If you remember back to October 2008, there were distinct murmurings about Hydra - an encompassing hardware and software solution to bring multiple GPUs together to act as one.  Then, in January 2010, Ryan tested the Hydra chip, with the end result being: more development required.  In my hands is the ECS P67H2-A, one of the latest boards to include the Hydra solution.  Armed with the latest version of the Hydra software too, I'm here to review this board, to see if it works as a suitable P67 solution, and if Hydra has anything more to offer.

We first met LucidLogix (now just Lucid) 2.5 years ago at IDF. The promise was vendor-agnostic multi-GPU setups with perfect performance scaling. The technology was announced at a very important time. Intel and NVIDIA were battling out support for SLI on Nehalem motherboards. NVIDIA didn't want SLI enabled on any non-NVIDIA chipsets, and Intel wasn't about to let NVIDIA build any chipsets for Nehalem. Lucid's Hydra technology seemed to be exactly what we needed to get around the legal holdup that kept Nehalem users from enjoying SLI.

Three things made Lucid's technology less interesting as time went on. Hydra took two years to come to market, NVIDIA enabled SLI on Intel platforms and single GPU performance got really, really good.

What made Lucid's Hydra tech possible was a software layer that intercepted OpenGL and DirectX calls from the CPU and directed them to a GPU of Lucid's choosing. While Hydra saw limited success, parts of the technology had another application.

Read on for our performance preview of Lucid's Virtu for Sandy Bridge platforms.