Lucid's Multi-GPU Wonder: More Information on the Hydra 100

Let's Talk About Applications

Obviously it'll accelerate games. What about GPGPU? That's not the focus of Lucid right now. They said they want to look at the largest market for the part and target that first, and gaming is certainly where that is at. It is physically possible that the hardware and software could load balance other tasks across the hardware, but this isn't something that is currently being explored or developed.

It will also accelerate games using multiple GPUs while outputting to multiple displays. Imagine 4 GPUs sharing the load over 3 monitors for a flight sim. Neither NVIDIA nor AMD can pull something like this off right now with their technology.

This can end up on both GPUs and on motherboards, and they can be cascaded. There is a limit to how many you can cascade because you will start introducing latency (but Lucid didn't define that limit). But 1 level deep is reasonable apparently. And this means it seems like it would be possible (except for the power requirements) to build a motherboard with 4 slots that had 4 cards each with 2 GPUs (let's say GTX 280s) connected by a Hyrda 100 chip.

And if scaling is really linear, 8x GTX 280 would certainly deliver way more than we could possibly need for a pretty good while. We'd be CPU and system limited until the cows come home (or at least a good 2 or 3 generations of hardware out into the future). Well, either that or developers would catch on that they could allow ridiculous features to be enabled for the kind of super ultra mega (filthy rich) users that would pick up such a crazy solution.

Upgrading hardware would be stupidly simple. Forget PhysX or anything like that: leave your older card in the system and upgrade to the latest generation and they'll both contribute equally to the rendering of frames (and since graphics is usually the largest bottleneck in the system, this will improve performance more than any other solution anyway). If we added a GTX 280 to a card with half it's performance, we'd see a 50% performance improvement over a single GTX 280. Not bad at all. There would be less downside in buying a high end part because it could continue to serve you for much longer than usual. And low end parts would still contribute as well (with a proportionally smaller gain, but a gain nonetheless).

Lucid also makes what seems like a ridiculous claim. They say that in some cases they could see higher than linear scaling. The reason they claim this should be possible is that the CPU will be offloaded by their hardware and doesn't need to worry about as much so that overall system performance will go up. We sort of doubt this, and hearing such claims makes us nervous. They did state that this was not the norm, but rather the exception. If it happens at all it would have to be the exception, but it still seems way too out there for me to buy it.

Aside from utterly invalidating SLI and CrossFire, this thing opens up a whole realm of possibilities. If Intel adopts it for their high end motherboards, they would have the ultimate solution for gaming. Period. If it's up to board vendors, chipset will still be less relevant in at least multi-GPU performance than the inclusion or exclusion of the Lucid Hydra 100.

But can they really do it? And how do they even attempt to do it? They've told us a little bit, and we'll brainstorm a bit and see what we can come up with.