Crossfire/SLi: Owned?

Overheal

Meet HYDRA:

Lucid's HYDRA GPU pairing technology could soon allow PC builders to incorporate multiple video cards that - hear this, ATI and Nvidia - don't have to be identical. What this potentially means, among other things, is that gamers could leverage old hardware instead of just sadly setting it aside, though paired cards must be of the same brand. HYDRA differs functionally from Nvidia's SLI and ATI's Crossfire solutions, which split rendering by sectioning off the screen and alternating frames between cards, respectively, by intelligently distributing highly specific rendering tasks between the GPUs. Instead of divvying up all the tasks equally, HYDRA will only send as many polygons or shader calls as each constituent card can handle (see right of the above pic for an example of what one of two cards might be rendering) - notice the right screen is rendering HDR, the other screen is not. Overheal. The most irritating aspects of current twin-card configurations (well, aside from the fact that you had to buy two cards in the first place) are the high cost and disappointingly low performance gains. HYDRA, which Lucid claims could scale to up to handle four unique GPUs, could remedy both of these issues if it ever comes to market. The company says it'll be soon, but that's as specific as they're getting for now. Visual learners can check out a detailed diagram of the system below.

If its what is says on the tin I'd certainly buy into it.

PogMoThoin

Looks promising, imagine the possibility of combining any Ati and Nvidia gpu to work together to render one image, but I doubt it will work.
Full Hydra article here

I've been following this elsewhere. You can't have more than one gpu driver in Vista, therefore your tied to either Nvidia or Ati, no mixing. Same problem if using a Nvidia gpu as PhysX in Vista, I've got an old 7 series gpu I want to use as PhysX (now that it supports it) but can't with an Ati gpu.

If this works, Intel will buy it.

uberpixie

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Looks promising, imagine the possibility of combining any Ati and Nvidia gpu to work together to render one image, but I doubt it will work.
Full Hydra article here

I've been following this elsewhere. You can't have more than one gpu driver in Vista, therefore your tied to either Nvidia or Ati, no mixing. Same problem if using a Nvidia gpu as PhysX in Vista, I've got an old 7 series gpu I want to use as PhysX (now that it supports it) but can't with an Ati gpu.

If this works, Intel will buy it.

I'm pretty sure I read an article on hydra that stated that Intel are one of the investors backing them.

So an Intel buyout is always possible I suppose, or at the very least some very lax licensing prices for Intel made motherboards.
If this works, this will make SLI/crossfire actaully worth it and I would def get a motherboard that carried a hydra chip.

As some articles have mentioned in the past how come ATI/Nvidia didn't come up with something like this before?

Especially Nvidia with their own motherboards?

Imagine how much money could be made even in the console market if this tech actually does work! Why build a console with a giant expensive gpu that gives off a lot of heat when you can use 2-4 smaller,cheaper,cooler ones?

Overheal

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Looks promising, imagine the possibility of combining any Ati and Nvidia gpu to work together to render one image, but I doubt it will work.
Full Hydra article here

I've been following this elsewhere. You can't have more than one gpu driver in Vista, therefore your tied to either Nvidia or Ati, no mixing. Same problem if using a Nvidia gpu as PhysX in Vista, I've got an old 7 series gpu I want to use as PhysX (now that it supports it) but can't with an Ati gpu.

If this works, Intel will buy it.

so it says in my above article, that they need to be the same brand, likely for that reason. They just dont need to be the same model anymore.

edit: or i read it where i found that article. eh? whered it go!

PogMoThoin

But they don't need to be the same brand with XP, Xp will allow 2 difrferent brand drivers to install together, just not Vista

Overheal

is that an architecture problem or is it something we could potentially see a fix for in the future

PogMoThoin

Overheal wrote: »

is that an architecture problem or is it something we could potentially see a fix for in the future

Nope its blocked in Vista, we'll see a fix when M$ release the Vista sourse code

Blazer

More updated article on it.


http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2328495,00.asp