MSI and Lucid have together designed the Intel P55 motherboard Big Bang Fusion, which will launch in about a month or so. Up until the motherboard launches it has now presented some numbers with demo platform. Lucid Hydra 200 is a circuit that enables users to not only mix graphics cards from the same company, but also cards from different companies for better performance in games and other 3D applications. Just like SLI and Crossfire, but without limitations in choice of graphics cards.
The first benchmarks with Lucid Hydra 200 have now been published. Even if Lucid, as earlier revealed, is still working on optimizing the drivers there is already great potential with the technology.
Most importantly we clearly see that Lucid has managed to get efficient performance scaling with its technology. Well on par with NVIDIA’s SLI and AMD’s Crossfire technologies.
Picture courtesy of TechReport
Except from being able to increase frame rates with a generous mix of graphics cards Lucid has some interesting plans for the future:
One demo we worked with showed a dual-monitor configuration on the HD 4890 / GTX 260+ setup (one monitor for each GPU) with HD video playback going on the GTX 260 driven display. While that was running, a benchmark iteration of Call of Juarez could be run that would still show performance gains (though slightly lower than with out the HD video playback) over the results from ONLY the HD 4890.
Overall Lucid Hydra looks to have a technology that will open up new doors for multi-GPU systems on the computer market. The success is highly dependent on the work Lucid is doing right now though, with optimizing the driver, and that companies like NVIDIA doesn’t decide to lock out Lucid. If Lucid could can raise interest Hydra Engine among motherboard makers, multi-GPU with NVIDIA graphics cards will be possible without a SLI license.
Lucid Hydra 200 tests:
– PC Perspective – TechReport – HotHardware –
Lucid Hydra 200 testing platform (PC Perspective)
