HYDRA Engine is a brand name for a multi-GPU solution developed by Lucid Logix. Similar to nVidia

NVIDIA

Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...

's SLI

Scalable Link Interface

Scalable Link Interface is a brand name for a multi-GPU solution developed by NVIDIA for linking two or more video cards together to produce a single output...

 and ATI

Ati

As a word, Ati may refer to:* Ati, a town in Chad* Ati, a Negrito ethnic group in the Philippines* Ati-Atihan Festival, an annual celebration held in the Philippines* Ati, a queen of the fabled Land of Punt in Africa...

's Crossfire

ATI CrossFire

AMD CrossFireX is a brand name for the multi-GPU solution by Advanced Micro Devices, originally developed by ATI Technologies. The technology allows up to four GPUs to be used in a single computer to improve graphics performance.-First-generation:CrossFire was first made available to the public...

-technologies, Hydra allows linking several video card

Video card

A video card, Graphics Card, or Graphics adapter is an expansion card which generates output images to a display. Most video cards offer various functions such as accelerated rendering of 3D scenes and 2D graphics, MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding, TV output, or the ability to connect multiple monitors...

s together producing a single output and higher performance. Unlike SLI and CrossFire however, Hydra allows video cards from different chip manufactures to be linked together. Lucid claims it can do so with near to linear scaling of performance, i.e. two video cards equals twice the performance. The technology consists of both hardware on the motherboard

Motherboard

In personal computers, a motherboard is the central printed circuit board in many modern computers and holds many of the crucial components of the system, providing connectors for other peripherals. The motherboard is sometimes alternatively known as the mainboard, system board, or, on Apple...

 and device drivers.

Currently there are two chips released under the Hydra Engine brand: Hydra 100 and Hydra 200. The basic concept behind the hardware is to intercept Microsoft DirectX or OpenGL

OpenGL

OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...

 sent to the video cards from the CPU and split these up to divide the calculation task fairly common amongst the present GPUs.

Reception

SweClockers.com

SweClockers.com

SweClockers.com is a Swedish online magazine about computers and computer hardware, founded in 1999, with about 150,000 unique visitors per week. The website has one of Swedens largests forums which is focused on computer hardware, software, modding and overclocking...

, when testing the MSI Big Bang Fusion which features Hydra 200, gave it very poor ratings citing the following: Poor drivers, poor game support, small if any performance gain over a single video card, graphical artifacts, unstable gameplay and a high price tag.