LucidLogix Virtu Release Candidate Posted on 24/02/2011 at 17:50 by Marc
LucidLogix has just announced that it has delivered the first Release Candidate of its Virtu technology to motherboard manufacturers, with products using this technology expected to come on sale as of the second quarter.
Designed for the Sandy Bridge platform, at the same time as connecting the screen to the graphics out on the motherboard it allows you to move from the Sandy Bridge IGP to the additional graphics card on the fly depending on load, like the NVIDIA optimus technology does with laptops. The additional GPU’s rendering is then copied into the Sandy Bridge IGP frame buffer to be displayed on the monitor connected to this.
We don’t yet know how much Virtu will cost, either price-wise or in terms of performance. We will also have to wait and see to find out how reliable the technology is. How much of a difference it will make on desktop platforms is however doubtful, especially before the Z68 chipset enabling the combination of the SNB IGP and CPU overclocking comes on stream. Even then, you have to say that the moderate energy consumption of modern graphics cards during video playback or simple ‘2D’ display is not crucial on desktop.
