Lucid's Multi-GPU Wonder: More Information on the Hydra 100

Barriers to Entry and Final Words

Depending on the patents Lucid has, neither NVIDIA nor ATI may be able to build a competing bit of hardware / software for use in their own solutions. And then there is the quesetion: what will NVIDIA and ATI attempt to do in order to be anticompetitive (err, I mean to continue to promote their own solutions to or platforms surrounding multi-GPU).

Because of the fact that both NVIDIA and ATI already participate in anti-competitive practices by artificially limiting the functionality of their hardware on competing platforms, it doesn't seem like a stretch to think they'll try something here as well. But can they break it?

Maybe and maybe not. At a really crappy level they could detect whether or not the hardware is in the system and refuse to do anything 3D. If they're a little nicer they could detect whether the Hydra driver is running and refuse to play 3D while it is active. Beyond that it doesn't seem like there is really much room to do anything like they've been doing. The Lucid software and hardware is completely transparent to the game, the graphics driver and the hardware. None of those components need to know anything for this to work.

As AMD and NVIDIA have to work closely with graphics card and motherboard vendors, they could try and strong arm Lucid out of the market by threatening either (overtly or not) the supply of their silicon to certain OEMs. This could be devastating to Lucid, as we've already see what the fear of an implication can do to software companies in the situation with Assassin's Creed (when faced with the option of applying an already available fix or pulling support for DX10.1 which only AMD supports, they pulled it). This type of thing seems the largest unknown to us.

Of course, while it seems like an all or nothing situation that would serve no purpose but to destroy the experience of end users, NVIDIA and ATI have lots of resources to work on this sort of "problem" and I'm sure they'll try their best to come up with something. Maybe one day they'll wake up and realize (especially if one starts to dominate over the other other) that Microsoft and Intel got slammed with antitrust suits for very similar practices.

Beyond this, they do still need to get motherboard OEMs to place the Hydra 100 on their boards. Or they need to get graphics hardware vendors to build boards with the hardware on them. This increases cost, and OEMs are really sensitive to cost increases. At the same time, a platform that can run both AMD and NVIDIA solutions in multi-GPU configurations has added value. As does a single card multi-GPU solution that gets better performance than even the ones from AMD and NVIDIA.

The parts these guys sell will still have to compete in the retail market, so they can't price themselves out of competition. More performance is great, but they have to worry about price/performance and their own cost. We think this will be more attractive to high end motherboard vendors than anyone else. And we really hope Intel adopts it and uses instead of nForce 100 or nForce 200 chips to enable flexible multi-GPU. Assuming it works of course.

Anyway, Lucid's Hyrda 100 is a really cool idea. And we really hope it works like Lucid says it will. Most of the theory seems sound, and while we've seen it in action, we need to put it to the test and look hard at latency and scaling. And we really really want to get excited. So we really really need hardware.