Lucid Virtu MVP in Intel 7-series to offer improved gaming performance

Lucid Logix first came into the limelight when they launched the Hydra Engine, which debuted on the MSI Big Bang Fusion motherboard. What this allowed enthusiasts to do is marry the performance of an Nvidia and AMD (ATI back then) graphics card in a dual-GPU setup. This wasn’t possible before, although every gamer longed for such a solution. Sadly, this fizzled off due to poor driver support, game support and too many issues, which hampered performance, rather than boosting it. Fast forward to 2011 and we witnessed Lucid’s other attempt with the Intel’s Z68 chipset, which fared a lot better. Here, the idea was to be able to use Intel’s onboard GPU as well as the discrete card as and when needed and this decision was made by Lucid’s new Virtu software. For Intel’s upcoming 7-series Ivy Bridge chipsets, however, Lucid plan on taking this idea one step further that will actually affect the game’s performance and in a good way.

Be in control!

An entry posted in Gigabyte’s unofficial blog created by enthusiasts who work for the company outline some of the new features brought about by Lucid’s Virtu MVP software. Besides all the features found in their current Virtu program in Z68 boards, uers will now have the ability to manually decide, which program uses which GPU. This is a similar feature most commonly seen in Nvidia’s Optimus and AMD’s Switchable Graphics solution on notebooks. A little peak into the control panel shows a bunch of installed programs and radio buttons to select, either the discrete (D) or the onboard (I) graphics card. Another bug feature is Virtual Vsync. This allows you to achieve frame rates greater than 60FPS, but without having to deal with screen ‘tearing’ at the same time. Most monitors have a 60Hz cap, so if you want smooth frame rates, you enable VSync in-game, but that also limits your frame rate to 60, even though your system can churn out more. This should benefit gamers greatly, provided it works like they say it does. 

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Finally, we come to HyperFormance. This feature aims at improving the game’s responsiveness. To quote Gigabytedaily, “Lucid Hyperformance basically examines each piece of data as it passes through the graphics pipeline with the aim of eliminating redundant rendering tasks. This allows for shorter rendering cycles which, in turn translates into better overall responsiveness for you the gamer.” While we know what Gigabyte is preparing for the 7-series, we’re sure that this new software will feature in other motherboards as well, from other partners.