PowerColor Wants to Wed ATI Radeon with Nvidia GeForce Using Hydra Chip

From X-bit Labs: PowerColor, a popular supplier of ATI Radeon-based graphics cards, plans to showcase an ATI Radeon HD 5770-based solution that sports LucidLogix Hydra chip, which allows to install the board into tandem with absolutely any graphics card, including Nvidia GeForce-based. The first demonstration is scheduled to take place next week at Computex Taipei trade-show.

PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 Evolution graphics board with Hydra Engine by Lucid will allow its owners to take advantage of hardware distributed graphics processing technology developed by LucidLogix in multi-GPU configurations. One of the advantages of such approach may be better scalability compared to ATI CrossFireX technology that relies on the so-called AFR approach, which does not scale well in certain cases. Another advantage of Hydra could be ability to boost graphics performance of systems based on older ATI Radeon HD graphics boards or even Nvidia GeForce graphics solution. The aforementioned way to upgrade, however, means that features like DirectX 11 will not work and some games may have issues.

Earlier Hydra processors from Lucid were only available on select mainboards from MicroStar International (MSI), but it looks like the interest towards hardware distributed graphics processing technology is increasing.

The manufacturer did not reveal any additional details about the Radeon HD 5770 Evolution, e.g. clock-speeds or the amount of memory. Besides, pricing and availability timeframe are also not clear. Earlier this year ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, promised to refresh the lineup of graphics chips by the end of the year and therefore time is ticking for PowerColor’s Evolution: the card should be made available rather sooner than later.

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