HYDRA Engine by Lucid - Multi-GPU Technology with No Strings Attached

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.

What about the possibility of combining an AMD and NVIDIA GPU to work together to render one image? This was my biggest hope after hearing the initial introduction. Apparently it won't be happening though as the operating system prevents multiple graphics drivers from running 3D applications at the same time. Since a 6800 and 9800 use the same driver from NVIDIA, both may operate in 3D mode without a hassle but combining AMD and NVIDIA just won't work. Let's hope for the future...

Why does Lucid feel the traditional methods that NVIDIA and AMD/ATI have been implementing are not up to the challenge? The two primary multi-GPU rendering modes that both companies use are split frame rendering and alternate frame rendering. Lucid challenges that both have significant pitfalls that their HYDRA Engine technology can correct. For split frame rendering the down side is the need for all GPUs to replicate ALL the texture and geometry data and thus memory bandwidth and geometry shader limitations of a single GPU remain. For alternate frame rendering the drawback is latency introduced by alternating frames between X GPUs and latency required for inter-frame dependency resolution.