Multibox heaven on the horizon.

[bugilt]

Multiboxer heaven!

Lucid's HYDRA GPU pairing technology could soon allow PC builders to incorporate multiple video cards that - hear this, ATI and Nvidia - don't have to be identical. What this potentially means, among other things, is that gamers could leverage old hardware instead of just sadly setting it aside. HYDRA differs functionally from Nvidia's SLI and ATI's Crossfire solutions, which split rendering by sectioning off the screen and alternating frames between cards, respectively, by intelligently distributing highly specific rendering tasks between the GPUs. Instead of divvying up all the tasks equally, HYDRA will only send as many polygons or shader calls as each constituent card can handle (see right of the above pic for an example of what one of two cards might be rendering).

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=607

[tolaziforname]

Chances are that for the first 6 months, it will be EXTREMELY buggy and not work correctly.

Why is this better than crossfire or SLI?

Why is this heaven?

[Xzin]

Saw this today. It has promise but I don't buy the hype yet.

[-silencer-]

Saw this today. It has promise but I don't buy the hype yet.

Agreed. Too many games have problems where they get *zero* benefit from SLI/Crossfire. I have less faith in the complexity of using different cards, especially if they're from different vendors. Props if they can get it done, but I'll believe it when I see it.

To date, the only time I've been truly impressed with graphics was when I finished the install of my 2x Voodoo2 12MB Glide cards back in '98. That was breakthrough technology in doing something that had never been done in gaming machines. The difference from standard gaming most were doing on the 4-8MB Matrox/nVidiaTNT cards to Voodoo2 in SLI was staggering in both fps and visual quality. Need for Speed and Red Baron 3D (the 3dfx Glide-enabled games) became unreal..

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Don't expect to see advances in Direct3D/OpenGL support in any current OS for this until probably 2012 or later, assuming the retail market even develops a need for this. This stuff is definitely long-range except for customized proprietary workstations.