The Lucid Hydra is supposed to be revolutionary: the new chip helps create more efficient Multi-GPU solutions by splitting work between the GPUs at a more fundamental level than what current software based Multi-GPU load balancing can do, although it hasn't been detailed exactly how that works, yet.
Lucid has said that it may allow to mix cards from different vendors although full support won't be available at launch. The chip will also support mixing cards from different performance and it will balance the load out by analyzing how long each card takes to render a frame.
This was what Lucid avidly promoted but today we're seeing another picture:
Driver profiles, or ways to deactivate the multi-GPU setup, as far as I could discern, due to possible glitches. Since Hydra was supposed to fix all of these problems of glitches or bad performance scaling, the dream starts to fade quickly.
Performance must be like... totally awesome! Right? No.
It apparently has little to no benefits. I don't expect performance to change going forward but I surely hope so.
One thing is working as promised, vendor agnostic multi-GPU:
These are good news indeed but the only lonely advantage. You can also use cards from different generations to have a slight boost but that would imply you use cards with the same shader model support or it will revert to the shader model support of the older card.
The technology looked promising but the whole picture isn't very pretty right now. The chips will cost money, perhaps more than the SLI license and definitely more than the free CrossFire support.
I'm not waiting for miracles on this one anymore.
Source: PC Perspective
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