First Lucid Hydra multi-GPU previews show up

Some of the first previews of the Lucid Hydra multi-GPU technology showed up today, you can check out some benchmark results at The Tech Report, HotHardware and PC Perspective. All three hardware sites had the opportunity to test a special Hydra development platform from Lucid and the company's multi-GPU solution seems to work as promised, the performance and scaling appears to be pretty good.

There are also some issues though, one of the problems of the Lucid Hydra 200 is that it is not compatible with dual-GPU graphics cards like the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 because the chip can only access one of the two GPUs. Another issue is that DirectX 11 support is still in the works, The Tech Report points out that continual driver support will be needed in order to maintain compatibility with future games.

The reality of these technical issues underscores a point: the Hydra will require continual driver support in order to maintain compatibility with future games. The Hydra doesn't yet support DirectX 11, for instance, and the company will have to develop that. Lucid remains focused on solid overall support for graphics APIs, though. Belz says Lucid's approach to fixing any problems its QA team finds in a specific game is to make a general tweak to its driver. Although that fix might resolve an issue with a particular game, he insists that game-specific profiles are not employed.

Bright Side of News on the other hand is a bit skeptical and suggest this may be a staged event by Lucid to cover up an issue with their product, as the site finds it odd that all three sites used exactly the same test system in Lucid's lab.

This demo and "preview" screams "fake Fermi" in very loud tones. It is even more of an obvious ploy than the now infamous use of the faked mock up by nVidia. We have a single external box [identical] used for the evaluation complete with drivers provided by Lucid of an unknown type [are they beta, can they be obtained publicly?] being written by a small and very select group of websites in the hope that the average consumer will not notice all three sites are using and testing the same piece of hardware. Just take a look at the images below if you do not believe me.