Lucid presented the Hydra Engine, that could be possibly replace proprietary multi-GPU technologies, about a year ago. NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFire enable users to connect multiple graphics cards of the same type for better performance. These systems are unable to mix graphics cards models though, even less graphics cards from different companies. Lucid saw an opening and took a run for it with the Hydra Engine that intendeds to open up for multi-GPU configurations with graphics cards of all kinds.
A year has passed and last we heard Lucid was working with MSI to make a motherboard with Lucid hydra on-board. At IDF Lucid revealed more details on Hydra 200, which is the latest version of this exciting circuit.
Lucid revealed that MSI P55 Big Bang will launch next month and that we will then get to enjoy multi-GPU scaling without limitations, more or less. They decided to showcase the technology by connecting two completely different graphics cards, AMD’s Radeon HD 4890 and NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 260 and got them to work together with better performance as the result.
There were not exact mentions of the performance, but judging from the demonstration it worked, and it did it without any driver tweaks or other modifications from the graphics card makers.
Graphics cards from NVIDIA and AMD in perfect harmony
More at Anandtech and PCPerspective.
