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NEW TECH ON THE HORIZON - Lucid Virtua

Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 10:25 pm
by Jaberwocky
Just spotted something of interest on the Annandtech web site.

Lucid,the developers of the Hydra chipset have come up with a new system called Virtua.
See the link below for Annadtechs take on it.It looks like it's still in development at present but shows some promise.

The system is designed to be used to integrate the Sandy bridge's built in graphics alongside a customers discrete GPU.

The system is designed to work like this.

Take one Sandybridge CPU and motherboard with VGA adapter on the motherboard, together with the Virtua Chipset and it's software layer.Add in say a 580 3GB card. The monitor is plugged into the onboard VGA and uses intels built in graphics on the cpu.During normal operation the 580 would stay idle.EG drawing/surfing the net or typing up comments on the Octane Forum asking when the next version of Octane will be ready :) .

Anyway as soon as the Virtua software detects that you are running heavy graphical usage like a game or say rendering up in Octane then it would kick in using the 580.The great thing about this is that you could keep using the intel built in graphics for other things whilst Octane renders up in the background.Also if you decided to run a game instead, the Virua software layer would switch over to the 580 so that you can run the game without unplugging the monitor cable at the back of your computer and swapping it over to the 580.

The link to the article is here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4199/luci ... -platforms

Re: NEW TECH ON THE HORIZON - Lucid Virtua

Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 7:08 am
by tehfailsafe
That's pretty nice.
Though then I wouldn't be able to overclock my CPU, which is why I love sandy bridge so much in the first place...

Re: NEW TECH ON THE HORIZON - Lucid Virtua

Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 7:11 am
by matej
Sounds really cool. This will be available only for Intel processors?

Re: NEW TECH ON THE HORIZON - Lucid Virtua

Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 9:22 am
by Jaberwocky
Matej

Yep . it looks like just Sandy Bridge chipsets at the moment.Who can tell for the future though.

tehfailsafe

looks like the upcoming Z68 Sandy Bridge chipset may solve the overclocking problem according to this article.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the- ... 0-tested/6