Last year we did a fair bit of talking about Lucid, and their Hydra chip. The Lucid Hydra chip is an independent solution to allow multiple GPUs to render scenes in games. This means that you are no longer dependent on SLI from NVidia or Crossfire from ATI. Lucid is able to perform this bit of magic by intercepting any OpenGL or DirectX calls. Asus developed a motherboard based on the Hydra chip, as did MSI. A little over a year ago, we even brought you some reviews of the Hydra chip.
Today, LucidLogix has announced a new software product called Virtu, which is short for GPU virtualization. Virtu intercepts any OpenGL or DirectX calls, just like the Hydra chip did. Virtu allows you to use both the GPU on the Intel Sandy Bridge processor as well as a discrete graphics card from NVIDIA or ATI. If you are playing a demanding 3-D game, then Virtu will send all the calls to the NVIDIA or ATI graphics card. If you are transcoding a video, then Virtu will send this to the GPU on the Intel Sandy Bridge processor, which is better for the task. Anandtech has a review of the new Virtu software.
Once setup there’s no user intervention necessary – the software just works. Fire up a game and it’ll run on your discrete GPU. Visit YouTube or transcode a video and your discrete GPU powers down leaving Sandy Bridge’s on-die graphics to handle the workload.
There is definite overhead to Virtu – I measured 2 – 8% on average, however I did see a 30% figure pop up in DiRT 2 on NVIDIA hardware. I’d expect the performance hit to be less than 10% in most cases.
via : Lucid’s Virtu Enables Simultaneous Integrated/Discrete GPU on Sandy Bridge Platforms @ Anandtech
