Lucid Hydra on Smackover 2

[Shintai]

The Hydra chip is all about LOAD BALANCING.....! It's main job is to know what the game is doing, and to know what resources are available to it and using the best graphics card to render aspects of the game, etc.

How this is actually done has not been released as has remained a secret..!

Though, with so many patents involved, one would have to suggest that it is true. Doubting it is natural, but to turn a blind eye and say it is a hoax is being a tad ignorant!

Even if it is 80% scaling with some graphic anomolies... it is a win/win for gamers.




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Im not saying its a hoax. And you now say that Lucid will test and make profiles for every game? You cant load balance something if you dont know what it is. And you need software to tag and determine it.

I guess you have your mind set on that this is a PC revolution. Where I just think its a console revolution. The Hydra 100 chip aint even PCIe 2.0.

What DirectX versions are supported or will be supported and what about OpenGL? Right now, only DX9 is working though DX10.1 will be ready by the end of the year. With DX10 and DX11's implementations of multi-GPU data improving and adding to the HYDRA Engine technology will only get easier for team compared to the work they had to do on DX9. OpenGL is supported by the HYDRA Engine as well.

Of course, not all is golden for Lucid quite yet - we have some questions and concerns about the technology that we hope will be addressed as the technology matures. Top on my list is the support that Lucid will be required to maintain if the technology succeeds. While much of the HYDRA Engine is automated there will be times when new games, new game engines and new rendering methods will be implemented by game developers that will require continual updating and tweaking on the driver side of the technology. With as large as NVIDIA's and AMD's driver teams are, even they cannot always keep up with the many games that are released throughout the year.

My other major concern is that this technology could end up like AGEIA's PhysX - great potential but gobbled up by one of the mega-players rather than turning into a product on its own. Honestly after hearing the entire presentation I was curious why NVIDIA or AMD hadn't already thought of this - the potential for being bought up is extremely high here.

How can Lucid be sure their task based distribution methods accurately represent what the game designers intended? An interesting dilemma - with the company essentially taking control of the graphics pipeline there are all kinds of ways for the company to accidently screw some things up. Lucid answered this by telling us their quality assurance program was already well under way. In fact, they use a pixel-by-pixel comparison engine comparing the HYDRA images to a single GPU render to check for errors or problems.

As for the chip itself, obviously Lucid is being very close lipped about it. The chip runs very cool and draws just about 5 watts of power. Inside the chip you will find small RISC processor and the custom (secret sauce) logic behind the algorithm powering the HYDRA Engine. The production chip was JUST finished yesterday and will be sampling to partners soon - though they wouldn't indicate WHO those partners were.

[Xoulz]

Im not saying its a hoax. And you now say that Lucid will test and make profiles for every game? You cant load balance something if you dont know what it is. And you need software to tag and determine it.

I guess you have your mind set on that this is a PC revolution. Where I just think its a console revolution. The Hydra 100 chip aint even PCIe 2.0.

Understood, but to be 99% efficient with certain aspect of the rendering process, the chip will probably need updates. But even without them, the Hydra Chip's design is inherently better than the SLI solution.

A "profile" may increase a certain games performance say another 7%, or remove an anomaly, but understand, we are talking about a processor solely dedicated to nothing but guiding information on a PCIe bus. A new motherboard design is required to make use of this technology!



Secondly, I understand it's limits, but that doesn't mean other products or revisions are not in testing or development. Lucid is probably releasing this chip for a revenue stream before setting their sights on the PCIe 3.0 standard.

As with anything in the hardware world, update or die..!




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