We heard of the Hydra Engine about a month ago, a solution that enables a mix of graphics cards with a perfect performance scaling. Hydra Engine is a dedicated chip used for distributing the workload in for example 3D games. We’ve been curious of Lucid’s development of the Hydra Engine ever since we first heard of it, and during IDF it revealed some more information that just make us want it even more. The result could be a motherboard with that can handle several graphics cards in multi-GPU configurations, which might explain why Intel is one of Lucid’s strongest supporters.
“The distribution engine as it is called is responsible for reading the information passed from the game or application to DirectX before it gets to the NVIDIA or AMD drivers. There the engine breaks up the various blocks of information into “tasks” – a task is a specific job that HYDRA defines that can be passed to any of the 2-4 GPUs in the system.”
Lucid claims that the performance will scale by more or less 100% with Hydra Engine, something we rarely see with SLI or CrossFire. Beside the performance scaling there are no limitations for which cards to use, except that they have to use the same driver. Alas, this means no mixing of AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards, but it’s not the hardware that can’t handle this but Windows that lacks support for two different graphics card drivers in 3D mode.
Full vs. half rendering
PC Perspective has published a very interesting article on the Hydra Engine where they have also included a Q&A section about the project which is expected to hit the market next year.
