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New Multi-GPU Technology With No Strings Attached
Vigile writes "Multi-GPU technology from both NVIDIA and ATI has long been dependent on many factors including specific motherboard chipsets and forcing gamers to buy similar GPUs within a single generation. A new company called Lucid Logix is showing off a product that could potentially allow vastly different GPUs to work in tandem while still promising near-linear scaling on up to four chips. The HYDRA Engine is dedicated silicon that dissects DirectX and OpenGL calls and modifies them directly to be distributed among the available graphics processors. That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again and the future of one motherboard supporting both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations could be very near."
If there's no strings, how are they connected?
No, but I did throw granola at a deaf person once
is that suppose to be ATI and NVIDIA
I gave TFA a quick perusal and it looks like some sort of profiling is done. I was about to ask about how it handled load balancing when using GPU's of disparate power, but perhaps that has something to do with it. It may even run some type of micro-benchmarks to determine which card has more power and then distribute the load accordingly.
I'll reserve judgement until I see reviews of it really working. From TFA it looks like it has some interesting potential capabilities, especially for multi-monitor use.
Someone port java to opengl.
Seriously. That would rock.
ATI were bought out by AMD, so future ATI GPUs will be released by AMD.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Can it work with Linux or OS X?
Ack! Will this outdate my math coprocessor?
Latency will be a problem. All that extra message passing and emulation layers.
Already, most Windows 3d games lead me feeling a little disconnected compared to DOS games.
The sound effects and graphics always lag behind the input a little.
Try playing doom in DOS with a soundblaster, then try a modern windows game. With doom you hear and see the gun go off when you hit the fire button. In a modern 3d game, you don't.
I've experienced the same thing over a number of different computers.
...
All your GPU are belong to Lucid!
(sorry guys)
what is attached though:
ints
booleans
longs
short
bytes
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
So its obvious that these cards could have been working together now for some time. They aren't as incompatible as AMD and NVidia would like us to think. Of course this leaves only one course of action; they must immediately do something "weird" in their next releases to make them no longer compatible.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Next you'll need a 1,000 watt power supply just to run your computer. How long until my home computer is hooked up to a 50 amp 240 volt line?
I mean, if one GPU is good and two GPUs are better, does that mean 5 are fantastic?
I used to have a Radeon 1950 Pro in my current system, which is nowhere near the top of the scale in video cards (in fact, it's probably below even average). It was so loud and literally doubled the number of watts my system took while running (measured by Kill-a-Watt). I took it out and now just use the integrated Intel graphics adapter. Man, that was fast enough for me but I don't play games very often.
I'm a big tall mofo.
How many people feel this is an old card that should be in a closet? If your not a hard core gamer that is a very good video card. My fastest card (out of 4 comps) is a 256meg 7600GS (comparable to a 6800GT) on an Athlon 2500+ w/1 gig mem. Plays all the games I want without a prob and is more than fast enough to run any none game app.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Sounds like Head In The Cloud Computing (TM)
I record my sleeptalking
Power supply units only supply so much energy, and before then cause interesting system instability.
Also, given the increasingly growing cost of energy, it might be worth buying a newer generation card just for the sake of saving the energy that would be used by multiple older generations of graphics cards. Not the newer cards use less energy in general - but multiple older cards being used to approximate a newer card would use more energy.
I guess power supplies are still the underlying limit.
As an additional aside, I'm still kind of surprised that there hasn't been any lego-style system component designs. Need more power supply? Add another lego that has a power input. Need another graphics card? Add another GPU lego. I imagine the same challenges that went into making this hydra GPU thing would be faced in making a generalist system layout like that.
Ryan Fenton
Why does the summary include two links to the same article? If there are two links, shouldn't there be two articles?
And why does the summary link the phrase "allow vastly different GPUs to work in tandem?" Not only isn't it a quote from the article, it actually contradicts the article. The article says "To accompany this ability to intelligently divide up the graphics workload, Lucid is offering up scaling between GPUs of any KIND within a brand (only ATI with ATI, NVIDIA with NVIDIA)." How did anyone get "vastly different GPUs" from this?
But it looks like it will need plenty of threads to work though.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I remember seeing something similar to what you're describing in terms of a power supply which fit in a front panel slot and was designed to add extra power for something like a new graphics card your old power supply couldn't handle, without having to replace the entire psu. At the time, though, it was more effective/efficient for me to just replace the old psu, and it did look like it could be cumbersome having the adjunct psu in a front panel slot from the standpoint of cabling.
A: Satriani is a messenger from God.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Well, is it?
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
That's why there are bigger power supplies. I can find 1200W ones without any trouble, or even a 2000W one at a major online store, though that one would be tricky to fit into most cases as it's double-high, not to mention the thing will run you $650.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I saw the product tonight at Intel Developer Forum. Looks like it actually works, and the execs in the booth said production silicon arrived yesterday.
Watch the forecasts. Tropical storms they're talking about potentially becoming hurricanes tend to dump a bunch of rain.
The chips are connected with Intra-Tubules which are micro versions of The Tubes that connect up the The Internets.
So I will be able to hook up 3 old graphics cards that each require 30 amps on the 12v rail and heavy cooling under load, and get the same performance as one newer card? I don't see a mainstream use for this.
While TFA does not give any prices, the Hydra chip and a mainboard with multiple PCIe x 16 slots (that is the high bandwidth variety you want for graphics cards) cost extra money too.
As an example, the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe (4 PCIe x 16 slots) costs 144 Euros at my preferred online store, while cheaper ASUS boards with only one PCIe x 16 slot costs 60-70 Euros. Add the Hydra chip, and I guess you'll end up with a price difference over 100 Euros. Which will pay for a midrange modern graphics card that equals several old ones in performance.
C - the footgun of programming languages
If you look at the open source drivers for GPUs, those are full of bugs, that means that this chip will have to deal with the bugs of ALL GPUs... Bare non-sense.
I want to take the opportunity to rant about the newest graphics cards, since that's slightly relevant to your post.
It's been two years since I upgraded my rig and the GF 7600GS could use a replacement. Except I can't find anything that would be reasonably more powerful and not output heat like an oven. GF 9600/9800 and Radeon 3850/4850 all have 70W+ TDPs and either come with noisy fans or really huge heat sinks.
That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again
I've still got a 6600 GT in my machine you insensitive clod !
The last thing I want is closed source shit infesting my linux install. [rant rant rant]
INVIZIBL MARKETSHAER! LOL!
You must be new to Florida. They always have more rain in late Summer and less rain in the Fall and Winter.
The weather stays fair and warm in October and November and the air fare and hotel rates are low until after Thanksgiving day.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
I'm still kind of surprised that there hasn't been any lego-style system component designs
are you serious? PCI/PCIe/SATA/eSATA/ISA/VESA I can name hundreds of standards that do just what you say. There are dozens of them out there for the interconnects and power.
The reason there are so many different ones out there is really 2 things. Not invented here, and can not expand the port anymore without burning out older equipment if you plug one in.
For example with PCI there was no reason to change the shape of the connector when they went to PCIe. Yet they did. It was mostly so if you plugged a PCI card into a PCIe slot it wouldnt melt your card and your MB. Could they have designed around that? Probably. But just from a simple it doesnt fit makes a lot of problems 'go away'. You also do not have to drag along legacy issues.
Once you fix yourself into a 'lego' style you buy yourself some short term flexibility at a long term design cost. They even tried this with the ISA slot. They kept making it longer and longer adding in more and more pins. You could take a 8 bit card from the mid 80s and plug it into a mid 90s MB and it would work if you had drivers. The problem was the connector got HUGE. More pins = more money. Sure its an extra 8 bucks but say your making 10k of the things... The flexibility ended up being a kludge ontop of a kludge.
Dont think so? Go look at a MB from the mid 90s. Look for a VESA/ISA mb. 16 bit ISA slot and then a 32bit VESA slot just after it. I sacrificed many knuckles on that bad boy design. They were painful to put in and take out. Snapped a few in my day just because they would get stuck.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_Local_Bus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vlb.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vlb_svga.jpg
Lego designs sound good at first. At first they are! Then you want to add something that doesnt fit anymore. That is when the kludges start rolling in.
I think picture quality would vary substantially over the combined image because of the differences in anti-aliasing and texture filtering algorithms used over the years. Newer cards have the ability to make custom anti-aliasing filters, but I still think that differences in texture filtering could be a problem.
That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again and the future of one motherboard supporting both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations could be very near.
This statement shows a lack of understanding of how video card hardware works. You could never combine the different platforms to render a single image. You'd be able to tell that there were two separate rendering implementations. Think back long ago, to the days when quake 3 was just coming out... ATI had a very lousy fog implementation. NVIDIA had a reasonable one. Now imagine that you're flipping the fog implementation between cards. One frame it might be ATI style the next, NVIDIA. Or even worse, two different implementations in the same frame!
This is also why you can't render 3D movies (like from 3DSMax) using hardware acceleration. Every pixel of every frame must be from the same algorithm. 3DSM does that in its own software.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
While the graphical rendering capabilities of an unmatched pair of older vidcards is limited (compared to newer cards), they might be more useful by games that take advantage of General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU) for its non-graphical systems.
Perhaps these could be makeshift physics accelerators? Or used for better 3D environment-sensitive sound?
Having a spare parallel processor around would be mighty handy...
One man's constant is another man's variable.