Lucid Hydra Is Still Useless On Linux

For anyone wondering whether the Hydra and other products from LucidLogix yet work under Linux, they do not.

LucidLogix is the company that designed the "HydraLogix Engine" via a hardware ASIC on the motherboard itself and a specialized driver to provide a multi-GPU technology similar to AMD CrossFire and NVIDIA SLI, but supports multiple GPUs across multiple vendors.

The latest product from LucidLogix is Virtu, which is designed for dynamically balancing graphics load between the integrated graphics processor on Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs (e.g. the Core i5 2500K) and any discrete graphics cards. It could be considered similar to ATI CrossFire Hybrid, for splitting the rendering workload between an IGP and discrete GPU, but in this case it's between the very interesting Sandy Bridge graphics and any AMD/NVIDIA graphics card.

The last time we talked about LucidLogix on Phoronix was just over one year ago when they said to us they had no plans to support Linux gaming just yet. Unfortunately, things have not changed. While they do have some interesting concepts, they do not yet provide the software support for Linux nor has anyone in the community attempted to reverse-engineer support for their ASICs.

As such, the Lucid Hydra chip on the new and very interesting Sapphire Pure Black P67 motherboard I am currently testing, is rendered useless under Linux. A review on this Intel P67 motherboard from Sapphire will be published in the coming days.