HYDRA Engine

I

inotocracy

Supreme [H]ardness
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This looks awesome! The images where they show how the scene is broken up and divided amongst multiple GPUs is cool, I wonder how well this will work?

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

At its most basic level the HYDRA Engine is an attempt to build a completely GPU-independent graphics scaling technology - imagine having NVIDIA graphics cards from the GeForce 6600 to the GTX 280 working together with little to no software overhead with nearly linear performance scaling. HYDRA uses both software and hardware designed by Lucid to improve gaming performance seamlessly to the application and graphics cards themselves and uses dedicated hardware logic to balance graphics information between the CPU and GPUs.
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This is indeed awesome tech if it comes to fruition. But where does this leave ATi and nVidia with their respective multi gpu solutions?
 
TruthInRuin said:
This is indeed awesome tech if it comes to fruition. But where does this leave ATi and nVidia with their respective multi gpu solutions?
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Hopefully it leaves them with motivation to improve their multi-GPU solutions. When you realize how flimsy and inconsistant SLI and Xfire are, it really is pretty bad. Sometimes SLI performs SLOWER than single GPU...Same with Xfire. I hope that this is a good wake up call for ATI and Nvidia to improve.
 
If this tech works, it would be smart for all of them to jump on-board.

Gets them out of having to spend for R&D, yet they can still capatlize on Multi-GPU Sales.
 
They both sell multi-GPUs as it is.
This would put Intel in the driver's seat with both of them in the back seat.
You ever tried driving from the back seat?
 
Are you assuming Intel would end up owning this product? Because if they don't, none of the graphics processors in the past have been worth a damn, and I hardly think any number of them would overwhelm what Nvidia and ATI have, put it this way, I will believe it when I see it.

Secondly...this product does not even exist. Nobody has even seen a working demo from what I have heard. Until it is actually out there, working, and not F'n peoples games up beyond belief, it is just a concept.
 
hasoos said:
Secondly...this product does not even exist. Nobody has even seen a working demo from what I have heard. Until it is actually out there, working, and not F'n peoples games up beyond belief, it is just a concept.
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Exactly. A comment from AT
May all be HYPE! by steveyballme, 3 hours ago

They haven't sent our labs an evaluation unit!
This may be another BigFoot in a freezer!
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If this works as advertised it will be the biggest advancement in PC graphics in years.
 
Neat, so this would be like multi-threading the graphics part of the application on-the-fly?
 
Raap said:
Neat, so this would be like multi-threading the graphics part of the application on-the-fly?
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More or less... which leads me to my first concern when I saw how they were splitting things up -- you'd think a delay would be introduced, which might very well manifest itself in a similar way to mouse lag with high response time (>6ms) LCD panels.

As many have already said, someone needs to see this working, in practice, before we get to the jumping up and down and cheering. It might be great for straight visualization/professional work where 'real time' can involve a delay between input and result, but could turn out to be all but useless for gaming.
 
This could be an incredible breakthrough but let's not open the bottle of champagne yet...
Current SLI/Crossfire technologies are inelegant and inefficient and this kind of development is much needed.
 
So, if this actually works, can something like this be done for CPU's, too?
 
These guys claim to have seen it in action

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2328495,00.asp

The test system we saw our live demo on contained two GeForce 9800 GT cards (basically identical to the 8800 GT in performance) and yet we saw Crysis running at 1920x1200 in DX9 mode, with all details cranked up, getting 45–60 frames per second all the time. That's far better than the usual SLI scaling. For three or four graphics cards, where SLI and CrossFire deliver diminishing returns
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I sure hope this does pan out, stupid current proprietary mulit-gpu implementations have kept me from buying that big monitor and 2nd video card. Was thinking an X2 but not anymore.

/Cheer !!!
 
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