NVidia Crushes MSIs Lucid Based Board

We have posted news about the new Lucid based motherboards in the past and have bothered MSI regularly to get us the new board to test out. Well if this is true and holds any kind of water we might never see this board out in the wild.

"The MSI boards were shown off at IDF a month ago, and there were several working models on display. They ran dissimilar ATI and Nvidia GPUs, basically putting a 48xx and a 47xx in 'crossfire', or two dissimilar NV GPUs in 'SLI'. It worked, and Lucid is promising a driver in Q1 or so that will allow NV and ATI cards to split the rendering loads.

That functionality was shown off behind closed doors, and the author did not personally see it, but you can read about it here. It is not final yet, and there is still a bit of work to do on the drivers, so for now, the Hydra is ATI + ATI, or NV + NV. Then again, given that the Hydra 200 only intercepts DX calls, it should work with just about any rendering hardware, with a bit of tweaking.

Nvidia is very protective of it's SLI 'technology', if you define technology as blacklisting those who don't tithe in the drivers. They use it as a blunt weapon to tax users and enthusiasts, not to mention to bring in money. We heard through the grapevine at IDF that Nvidia was not happy about Lucid, and was going to break Lucid's Hydra chip at the driver level to protect its SLI tax."

Okay maybe not that drastic, but it will be a hard battle for Lucid to win. 

Related Web URL: http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/11/04/nvidia-crus...