ASUS Pre-Computex 2010 Seminar

👤by Sahil Mannick Comments 📅27-05-10
ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme + Lucid (Continued)

Some may recall two years ago a small company, by the name of Lucid, were developing a chip that would enable a multi-GPU solution on any platform and using any graphics card. It didn't bode well for AMD or Nvidia who saw their own multi-GPU implementation being threatened, more so for Nvidia who required license fees for SLI. But for the consumer it was looking promising, and the prospect of being able to add any additional GPU to their system for a boost in performance was close to becoming a reality. However, Lucid's first chip, the Hydra 100, failed to scale well and was plagued by lacklustre drives. Backing and funding from Intel meant that company wasn't going to give up and at the end of last year, the Lucid Hydra 200 chip was developed. It wasn't long before MSI adopted it in their flagship motherboards but performance was still not on par with native Crossfire and SLI implementation, which was delivering almost 100% scalability with two GPUs.



At this point you might be asking yourself what ASUS's motives are for adopting the Lucid Hydra chip given its uninspired performance. We have to realise at this point that we're dealing with an AMD chipset and historically SLI has always been absent for obvious reasons. ASUS wanted to break that barrier and bring SLI support back onto the AMD platform (a potent combination back in the nforce 4 days) and their solution was the Lucid Hydra 200 chips. Rather than opting for the hot running NF200 chip or dealing with licensing issues between Nvidia and AMD, the Lucid Hydra was the preference. With Lucid, the Crosshair IV Extreme offers flexibility for multiple GPUs from both vendors and ASUS also claims a performance gain compared to AMD's native crossfire solution.



The Crosshair IV Extreme has a tweaked layout compared to the Formula, sporting 5 PCIe 2.0 x16 slots that can fit up to 4 dual slotted graphics cards. With additional lanes from the Lucid Hydra chip, the motherboard allows three cards to run at the full x16 link width in for tri SLI/CrossfireX. For quad CrossfireX, two cards will run at x16 and the other two at x8. Note that quad SLI isn't supported due to the lack of NF200 chips but having SLI is already a major breakthrough on the AMD platform that we shouldn't complain.

There are two different configurations that support dual-GPUs; the first requires the cards to be installed in the 1st and 3rd PCIe slots, relying on the board's native support for Crossfire in this case, and the second method is to use the 2nd and 4th slots instead whereby multi-GPU support comes from the Hydra 200 chip. The latter is necessary for SLI but is also recommended by ASUS for ATI Crossfire over the native solution for performance gains of around 1-4%. The reason for the performance benefits are not clear but ASUS emphasised that they have been working very closely with Lucid for two years to optimise their drivers. Immature drivers prevented ASUS from being early adopters of the Lucid IC but they now believe that the drivers have progressed far enough to surpass native SLI/Crossfire. There is one caveat in that driver updates from ATI will no doubt improve native Crossfire performance so users will have to wait a week or so for Lucid to update their own drivers.



For too long, AMD have lived in the shadow of Intel's dominance from a performance perspective. Their 890FX chipset is designed to change this, coupled with the recently released Thuban Phenom II X6 CPUs. ASUS are also taking the opportunity to showcase many of their unique features on the Crosshair IV Extreme to leverage AMD into a successful gaming and performance platform without the costs normally attributed to an Intel set-up.

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