LucidLogix is back in the news with a new chipset called ‘Hydra’ which offers a completely new way to support multi-GPU’s in systems. What makes it different than SLI and CrossFire you may ask? Well, first you need to understand one of the major drawbacks of those technologies:
Nvidia’s SLI and ATI’s Crossfire run in alternative frame rendering (AFR) mode where each card renders one frame. Problem is, there are inter-frame dependencies, and for each GPU one always renders more than one frame ahead – often two – to make the GPU more efficient.
So when users run triple or quad SLIs (or Crossfires), they are actually rendering at least eight if not more threads ahead. If a user is running a game at 30fps, eight frames is a big deal: he would experience either an eight-frame delay or skipped frames and lowered performance.
The “Hydra” system works by dividing the scene into discrete objects, such as segmenting a scene into floor, walls, characters, weapons, particle effects, etc. These objects can be distributed among the various GPU’s, and then re-composited by the Hydra chipset. It’s a far more scalable solution than SLI or Crossfire, but puts additional load on the software to properly segment the scene.
Will it take-off? Who knows. As multi-GPU becomes more commonplace as an alternative to higher-end video cards (Moore’s law in action, if you can’t make `em faster, just make more of `em) solutions like this will keep popping up.
via Multi gpu tech lucid to take on graphics giants – The Inquirer.
