Lucid came along last year and promised to let any motherboard chipset work with any combination of GPUs; to enable you to pair an ATI
Radeon HD 5870 with an NVIDIA
GeForce GTX 295 and get 100 percent the performance out of both -- assuming you have a suitably gluttonous power supply. We were naturally a bit skeptical and so when the company largely disappeared for a year we figured they'd pulled a
Steorn, biting off more than the laws of physics allowed. We're happy to say we were wrong. The company has unveiled its HYDRA 200 Parallel Graphics Chip, a tiny 65nm processor that, when installed on a motherboard or expansion card, enables the utilization of two disparate graphics cards. No more proprietary bridge cables or worries about who plays well with who.
MSI is the first company to sign up, demonstrating its Intel P55-based Big Bang Gaming Motherboard, offering a HYDRA 200 and three PCIe slots for some sweet GPU potpourri. No price is announced yet, but it's expected to release in time to make an appearance inside your holiday system build.
Read - Lucid Announces HYDRA 200
Read - HYDRA-Powered MSI Big Bang Gaming Motherboard
posted Sep 23rd 2009 9:24AM
Do the cards each have to support Crossfire/SLI? Or just any two cards at all?
This seems too wild to be true.
Well, it looked like it said no bridge was required... so any card.
does this mean we can have a laptop with an intel integrated gpu and an ati gpu?
dont be brand-ist people... mix branding is OKAY :)
Here is a great article with diagrams as well as a video of the technology at work.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=785
They also confirm that they say scaling between an AMD card and NVIDIA card!
I, for one, welcome our bi-curious gaming-rig overlords.
Come on, what the hell is happening there ?
One of the five first comments should have been about asking if it will run Crysis...
Hooray!
Lol......My 8800 GTS + Geforce 5200 FX = ???????.............pls say GTX :D
Too bad my GTX 280 eats everything I throw at it maxed at 2560x1600
Don't ask. I don't play Crysis :P
Still can't find "edit" button.
My point is: next-gen single-chip monster cards will be able to do much more than my video card, which defeats the purpose of multi-GPU video cards. At least for the moment.
In my honest opinion :P
I agree when talking about CrossFire or SLI; but with the ability to purchase any new, reasonably priced card, toss it in the system, and have your performance increase is very useful.
...does this mean I might be able to use two or three SLI-enabled cards on a Crossfire board (or vice-versa) in the near future?
This will either amount to nothing or revolutionize the industry. I'm not sure which.
If it actually can combine the power of any two video cards without a performance loss/compatibility problems, then it'll be huge. It would be great to be able to buy a video card and then, instead of replacing the video card after a year or two, simply adding one to multiply your system's power. The downfall of SLI/CF is that you have to buy the same card; with this, I could theoretically add a 5870 to the power of my (somewhat outdated) 8800GT and get something greater than either.
You know, the more I type, the more I get the feeling that there's got to be a catch.
You don't necessarily have to add the same card for CrossfireX. For instance, you could pair an HD5870 with an HD5850. Not so for SLI, however.
Well actuall this is a bit misleading since Lucid said that you cannot pair an ATi card with an nVidia one with the Hydra, however you can pair any generation of the same chip maker, so basically I don't think we'll be seeing any HD 5870's paired with GTX295's, unless they specified otherwise in a more recent release.
And no, none of the cards are required to support any kind of multi GPU technology since all of that is done on the Hydra chip.
Still looks like some great tech though, if it works. But what I, and I'm sure a lot of other people want to see now, is some actual benchmarks, and real world testing with the thing.
Yeah, same here. I am extremely skeptical of that 100% performance claim. Why haven't the OEMs been able to pull off anything close to that? SLI will utilize 60% of the second GPU in the most ideal conditions, practically it's around 30-40%. That is assuming a) the game supports SLI, and b) it doesn't have any nasty bugs with it, and c) you can put up with the (albeit minor now) hitching. That's why I haven't ever purchased a second video card or a dual-GPU card. If this can even get close to 100%, like 80%+ consistently with few issues, I will be the first in line to buy a mobo or PCI-e card with that chip on it.
what are you talking about? Did you not watch the video or even look at the last picture in that pc perspective link? It clearly shows a GTX 260 and a HD 4890 together. The guy from Lucid in the video also explained this when he went over the chip and when he spoke about the big bang mob from MSI.
This could have a lot of potential.....
This will only have potential if it works on everything. It's not driver bound at all. So, as far as games are concerned, you just have ONE big ass card. If it'll be driver bound like SLI and Crossfire, it's pretty pointless in the long run.
Wonder how the graphics cards drivers deal with this.
Do you go into Catalyst settings to enable it, or do you go into NV CP, and hell, how does Windows itself deal with 2 disparate cards in one system.
Furthermore, I seriously doubt you can get 100% performance out of each card in combo SLI/Xfire modes.
Even 2 NV cards in pure SLI or 2 ATI cards in Crossfire don't net 100% performance out of each card in a vast vast majority of cases, rather you'll see gains of 140-180% combined.
I'd love to see some independent benchmarking.
Even if its like 80% efficiency Its amazing..What games can i play if I combine a card with shader 3.0 support and shader 1.0 support.Can I use an video encoder which runs on CUDA if one card supports it and the other does not????..Its really confusing.
suspicious about that "bring 100% out of both" part
Date for the MSI release is October 29th as seen here http://event.msi.com/mb/bigbang/
Finally. I've been waiting for a long time for them to announce a board with one of these chips on it. If the Hydra lives up to its claims, it could be one of the single most important technologies for GPUs in the upcoming year.
How do drivers work for this setup? Do you install ATi and nVidia drivers together? I mean for regular 2D work you still need to use 1 video card...
They're heavily financed by ziontel, this is obviously a scam.
go away sagi. haha
Too bad we have to buy a new motherboard for this, when I just purchased my X58 Rampage II Gene a few months ago.
When will this hit X58 boards?
Never.
2xSiS 6326 cards = WTFBOOM!?!
Nahh, I'd be all for pairing my Voodoo2's with a 5870, even if it only meant seeing the 3DFX logo at startup haha ;)
I wish 3DFX would come back :(
I still have my 12MB Voodoo2 sitting on my shelf.
Ahhhh, 3dFX...
I have my Voodoo5 5500 in a box somewhere...
So they put it on a P55 which can only do 8x8?
8x 2.0 slots are no problem at all, only crossfired 5870x2 cards would probably fill that much bandwidth.....
It's previous gen PCIE that would be a problem.
October 29th ?
this could be the best thing since sliced bread!
but it won't be... I mean, this is really too good to be completely true. But even if it has some minor limitations, it can be great.
eagerly waiting! a month isn't that much!
I'm curious how this thing deals with multi-pass effects. It either duplicates the scene rendering, starts passing buffers around, or breaks the visual effect.
If this can eventually to used allow for GPU upgrades in laptops, I'm all for it.
65nm? Not good enough. I want 32.
(And i want it now.)
bah... sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Or creating a new series of headaches:
1: You need nvidia and ati drivers to both work correctly at the same time.
2: Any problems you have with a particular make and model of GPU will now be prevalent in your dual or triple setup.
3: Who has high end cards both from ATI and nvidia at the same time as opposed to buying one or the other, or two of one or the other, or getting a companion to one you already own at a later time.
wait wait wait, does this increase pci-e lanes in the i5 proccessor? Can i get x16/x16 with an i5. Like say 2 5870's running at full x16/x16.
What I'd like to do is run two Radeon HD 5870s in Crossfire, and when Nvidia releases their DirectX 11 cards, two of those in SLI. Then run them all on the same board with Lucid technology. That would be sick. (Although probably very unpracitcal and a power sucking beast.)
just checking something with this post. But man if this works well there will reason for some of the older (subjective) GPUs to return to their owns setups. That is assuming that it is backwards compatible.