There is coming to market a new graphics enhancement. Lucid is finally delivering their Hydra system to the marketplace. The Hydra system at its heart is a load balancer, it allows you to mix and match different graphics cards. Nvidia and or ATI different model numbers everything is fair game. The Hydra system looks at the available cards and then has each one render different pieces of the screen image.

I know from working on the Nvidia bug that Decal does not benefit from SLI, it uses a single card when running.
My question is -
is this going to behave like SLI?

I am curious because this new technology will be quite popular as it allows you to use your old graphics cards and add newer better all the while having the best possible performance. That and I would be curious to see how working with Nvidia cards it handles the skyboxen bug.

So anyone got any input?

 

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Most probably.

I'm not 100% on all of this, but here is my understanding:

The reason why Decal does not like SLI (and the reason it is so slow) is the rendering of Decal views. In order to render them, Decal locks the buffer, which means that DirectX has to copy the rendered screen data from the GPU to main memory. Basically, this operation forces everything to stop and wait while Decal draws a view. During normal operation (without Decal), the GPU is spending almost all its time rendering things, even while AC or your computer are doing something else.

As for SLI and/or this new system, I would guess that anytime a lockable backbuffer is present, SLI or similar is not used. This is likely because of the way that SLI shares parts of the screen; in order to copy data back to main memory each card would have to send back its own portion and those would have to be reassembled into the full image. The manufacturers probably didn't bother to code this because using SLI in this circumstance wouldn't help anyway.

 

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I live in hope thou

The numbers they have been pulling from "mediocre" video cards running intensives like Crysis are actually very good.

Hopefully Lucid will release more of their specs and we can get a better idea of whats going on...

thanks for the info VI

 

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got a link to the article about this new thing? id like to read

 

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Dirty Elf - sorry I been a little swamped and distacted...
I read about the release on Slashdot or engadget I think.

MSI is bringing the board out this month I believe its called the big bang.

 

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