Lucid Hydra 200: Vendor Agnostic Multi-GPU, Available in 30 Days

[G0ldBr1ck]

exactly what i was thinking

how would this balance the workload between a faster card and a slower card, like 5870 and 7800 gt.... how does it know which GPU takes x amount of time to process certain task??

If one card finishes its part of the scene faster than the other card the hydra chip would adjust the work load until they were rendering there part of each frame at the same time. I guess it would have to do this continously on the fly. And since the workload is split up by objects, I dont think diffrent types of AA would realy be a problem. One object may just look smoother than other objects.

Most people that will be taking advantage of this tech will most likely not be throwing in a 3-4 generation old card in with a new gen card anyway.

[Orthogonal]

If one card finishes its part of the scene faster than the other card the hydra chip would adjust the work load until they were rendering there part of each frame at the same time. I guess it would have to do this continously on the fly. And since the workload is split up by objects, I dont think diffrent types of AA would realy be a problem. One object may just look smoother than other objects.

There's still a problem with this, if you saw some of the details the press reported on the Hydra chip last year, it said that the Object based rendering was "rebalanced" for every frame, meaning an object could be rendered on one card for one frame, and then the other card for the next frame. The press noted in the UT3 demo that in real-time the two monitor's showing the split card video was "flickering" as each object was rendered at different times by different GPU's.

This would mean that objects would appear to change in apparent AA smoothness very quickly. It may happen so fast that you don't notice it, but it may be a problem or cause visual artifacts of some kind.