SLI rendering has gained a lot of popularity lately, even to the point where people are making SLI rigs of pre-SLI’ed cards like the 9800GX2 and the 4870X2. The problem is that drivers and motherboards aren’t really set up to take advantage of two cards. Sure, it works a lot better than one card, but Hydra feels that it’s time mobos got an integrated SLI controller that works out all the SLI business in hardware. At the moment the cards have to either be in constant communication so each knows what the other has been assigned to do, or they switch off frames, which also requires them to constantly update each other, wasting memory bandwidth.
Hydra’s “Lucid” technology does all the SLI-organizing work in hardware, and is so good at it that it can work with a Radeon and a GeForce at the same time as easily as it might with two of either. It breaks up the scene, assigns and keeps track of the parts each card renders, and reintegrates it once the cards do their calculations. Man, that’d be nice, I hope it really works.