There was a time when you’d have to stick to one of the two graphics chips makers in case you wanted, some day, the Multi-GPU upgrade option. Heck you even had to stay within the same card generation, same specs as well, if you wanted that sweet sweet frame rate boost two graphics cards offered. That’s no longer the case.

The Lucid Hydra 200 chip is designed to take any supported graphics card and allow you to pair it up with the competition’s graphics cards with some interesting scaling results. HotHardware has a few test cases:

We tested the graphics cards in this article using a unique setup provided by Lucid. The main components consist of a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R motherboard powered by Intel’s Core i7 920 quad-core processor and 2GB of OCZ DDR3 RAM. Of course, this particular motherboard does not feature Lucid technology so as a result, the graphics cards were installed on a special evaluation board featuring the Hydra 200 chip. The evaluation board was connected via PCIe card installed on an x16 slot on the GA-EX58-UD3R motherboard. We were told that this test setup simulates the performance of the Hydra 200 when integrated on a mainboard.

It’s not final and hasn’t been integrated into a motherboard yet but the performance it’s pumping out is highly impressive and should be on most gamer’s want lists, and high end motherboards, in short order.

The thought of a computer using two graphics cards from very different graphics chip vendors would seem absurd, or even vaporware in the eyes of many…well it would seem we all have a bit of rethinking to do over the next few months.

AnandTech scoped out the Lucid Hydra 200 chipset which is set to allow for game acceleration by graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia, and perhaps Intel in the future, all at the same time:

There are three versions of the Hydra 200: the LT22114, the LT22102 and the LT22114. The only difference between the chips are the number of PCIe lanes. The lowest end chip has a x8 connection to the CPU/PCIe controller and two x8 connections to GPUs. The midrange LT22102 has a x16 connection to the CPU and two x16 connections for GPUs. And the highest end solution, the one being used on the MSI board, has a x16 to the CPU and then a configurable pair of x16s to GPUs. You can operate this controller in 4 x8 mode, 1 x16 + 2 x8 or 2 x16. It’s all auto sensing and auto-configurable. The high end product will be launching in October, with the other two versions shipping into mainstream and potentially mobile systems some time later.

Interesting technology which should make for some interesting testing with mixed and matched graphics boards.