Thread: Want to run a 5870 and GeForce 360 in SLI-Fire?

News has been virtually non-existant since Lucids 'Hyrda' chip first popped up, but now, they appear to have be about to deliver on their promises: a chip that allows you so mate together any two graphics cards you desire, and (alledgedly - will believe it when the benchmarks come through) achieve better scaling than either Nvidia or ATI can currently offer.





Basically it works by using each GPU as a pure calculating device, rather than as graphics device - much as your DX10 cards do when transcoding video or working as a physics chip. The chip then makes each card do a proportional share of the encoding required to generate a video frame. The result is that the chip doesn't care whether the 'calculating device' (GPGPU) is ATI or Nvidia, it simply divides up the work to do and renders your game. If this technology takes off, if Nvidia/ATI don't find any way to cripple it, and if Ludis drivers pay off (that is a lot of if's) then this could revolutionise how we buy, use and upgrade our cards. The first board to use the Hyrda chip (the MSI Big Bang pictured above running a 4890 and GTX 260) is already out and will apparently be in retail channels within 30 days:

Wonder how long it will take for Nvidia and ATI to cripple and sabotage this idea.

Wait so this chip is in the motherboard?!?!?!?!?!

Incredible. Hope this takes off!

Well it's not really any different to the IBM Cell/Opteron architecture in roadrunner. You have multiple CPUs (in this case GPUs) and you use them in parralel. Since they are calculators that work in a similar way, you can quite easily get them to intoperate with each other.

I however don't really see the point. This is not a consumer chip no doubt. And I don't see any big bussiness buying 1 ATI card and 1 Nvidia card. They're gonna buy the same ones!

Nvidia with tegra would like this market to themselves, but with IBM's Cell I'm not sure these GPU calculators will ever have much future. Well apart from little reviewers who do it for kicks and because IBM will never send them a real chip!