Lucid Puts its HydraLogix Chip on Graphics Cards

It’s been a little while since we’ve last heard much out of Lucid Logix, although at Computex this past June, MSI told us that it was committed to the technology and would continue integrating it into some of its motherboards. But what about those who aren’t using MSI motherboards? A new announcement takes care of that, which states that we’re close to a more integrated solution.

To be more integrated would mean that the Hydra chip would be located right on a graphics card, and sure enough, that’s what’s soon going to happen. The first company to bring such a product to market will be PowerColor, although it’s unknown what models are affected, and whether or not it’s going to first cater to the low-end or high-end.

The press release hints at the possibility of a $99 solution, but whether that will be available at launch, we’re not sure. Essentially though, these products will allow full Hydra utilization, meaning that you could install one card with the Hydra chip, and then any others you want, AMD or NVIDIA. One scenario is that a gamer could purchase an HD 5870 today with a Hydra chip, and then something like a GTX 480 or HD 6870 down the road and pair them together without issue.

Although we’ve been keeping up on Lucid’s product for quite a while, we still haven’t had a hands-on experience. We hope to with this upcoming launch, though. I’m still a bit unsure of the use of this technology with SLI and CrossFireX support being so common today, but I can see its use in some instances, like the one where you could pair up an older card with a newer one. Neither SLI or CrossFireX could even hope to offer such a solution.

KFAR NETTER, Israel and SANTA CLARA, California – August 30, 2010 – Today LucidLogix Technologies (Lucid) announced its arming video card manufacturers with the new Unity graphics board architecture for the HydraLogix engine (previously known as HYDRA). Now graphics board vendors for the first time can combine a single HydraLogix 200 real time distributed processor with any single NVIDIA or ATI GPU, creating an affordable, flexible multi-GPU-ready graphics card that can make any motherboard a high performance gaming system.