We've never been big fans of multi-GPU technologies, such as SLI and CrossFire. They consume more power and, once you scale beyond two GPUs, efficiency drops substantially.


Part of the problem is the alternate frame rendering technique used by SLI and CrossFire—if nothing else, latency starts to creep-up as you pre-render more frames in advance. More importantly, DirectX 10 really isn't designed to effectively take advantage of more than two GPUs.

LucidLogix Technologies is working to change that.

The company is developing a chip they're calling the HYDRA Engine. HYDRA is a chip-based technology that essentially acts as a real-time traffic cop, making intelligent decisions to direct portions of the 3D rendering task to particular GPUs that may have spare cycles.


The idea is to parse the problem to a much finer grain than a full frame, so that each GPU can work on much smaller chunks of the compute task.

While early iterations of Lucid's technology focuses on three or four GPU solutions, LucidLogix VP Offir Remez suggests that the technology can scale to many more GPUs than just four.

That could be an interesting option for server-side rendering, which seems to be picking-up steam in both online gaming and interactive cinema. HYDRA is not really a GPU in and of itself, and will work with any manufacturer's GPU—Nvidia, ATI, or others. Remez also claims that it's not chipset dependent, and can work with any core logic technology.

One interesting application for HYDRA is to work with a set of lower-power, lower-performance GPUs. For example, if perfect scaling could be achieved with four Nvidia 9600 GT class GPUs, performance would likely be better than one or even two GTX 260s.

This would also validate ATI's approach to building lower power GPUs with performance that's "good enough", such as their latest Radeon HD 4850.

While it all sounds very cool in principle, the proof will be in products, and how those products perform. Remez anticipates first product shipments of HYDRA-based boards to arrive in the first half of 2009. The company will be showing-off early units at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum, which begins August 19th.