The Extreme4 Gen3 takes advantage of Lucid’s VIRTU since it uses the Intel Z68 chipset. VIRTU is designed for the Sandy Bridge platform and assigns tasks to best available graphics resource based power, performance, and features.

As most would know, Intel Z68 takes advantage of a key feature that is found from the Intel H67 chipset – video outputs. Since the Intel 2nd Generation processors have an iGPU built-in some may want to use this as an option and also use a discrete graphics solution. What VIRTU does is – it allows the user to utilise both discrete GPU and Intel's iGPU (built in graphics on the CPU) without the need to change hardware or switch the outputs.

VIRTU brings in many unique features, a great deal of them are associated with power management – relating to heat, fan speed, and other useful elements. There are two different modes to use when considering VIRTU:

i-Mode

This provides the user with Intel features and power saving options when not being used for 3D gaming. Display must be connected to video output on the motherboard to use this feature.

d-Mode

This mode allows gamers to enhance their 3D experience and performance – combining a discrete graphics solution and the iGPU. In this mode we can use VIRTU to assist with things like transcoding and media encoding in general. The overriding thought on this is that even entry level AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards have their own technologies for handling media encoding such as AMD Stream and NVIDIA CUDA – both of these technologies are deemed as being exceptional alternatives and don’t offer any real advantage over VIRTU using iGPU for these types of task.

Display drivers for discreet graphics card must be installed prior to VIRTU drivers.



For more information on VIRTU please go to: http://www.lucidlogix.com/product-virtu1.html