Even though sub $100 hardware is very high volume, we don't often see a lot of heated debate surrounding them. People don't usually get excited about mainstream and low end hardware. The battle for who can run the newest game with the coolest effects at the highest resolution, while not applicable to most people, tends to generate quite a bit of interest. There is a lot of brand loyalty in this industry, and people like to see the horse they backed come out on top. Others, while not siding with a particular company, jump on the wagon with what ever company has the fastest part at any given time. I, myself, am a fan of the fastest hardware out at any given time. I get excited by how far we've come, and how much closer the top of the line gets us to the next step. Keeping up with top of the line hardware is more like attending a sporting event or taking in a play: the struggle itself is entertainment value.

For some, knowing what's best does have relevance. For many many others, it is more important for to keep track of hardware that, while cheap, is as capable as possible. And that is where we are today.

At the end of July, NVIDIA released their GeForce 9500 GT. This part (well, the GDDR3 version anyway) is almost a drop in replacement for the 8600 GT as far as the specifications go. In fact, the prices are nearly the same as well.

No, it isn't that exciting. But even these very low end add in cards are head and feet above integrated graphics solutions. While we'd love to see everything get more performance, the price of the 8600 GT has dropped significantly over time. We haven't gotten to a point where people who aren't willing or able to spend above $100 on a graphics card can get good experiences on modern games. At least software and hardware complexity tend to parallel each other to the point where the disparity in how new a title can be played on cheap hardware isn't getting any worse.

So with so many similarities, why release this part? There won't be an endless supply of G84 hardware going forward. Thus the G96 comes along with nearly the same specs selling at the same price. The decreased die size of the 65nm G96 (as opposed to the 80nm G84) will also help to increase profits for NVIDIA and board partners on this hardware while they sell at the same price point. There are rumors that NVIDIA will even move the G96 to 55nm later this year further increasing their saving and possibly enabling passive cooling solutions. But we will have to wait for a while yet to find out if that will actually happen.

Before we get into the 9500 GT itself, let's take a look at the state of the industry that brought us to this point.

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So, lots of people were asking really good questions about Lucid and their Hydra engine after we posted the initial story on it. We had the opportunity to sit down with them and ask some of those and other questions. And they had quite a lot of really interesting things to say.

From a mile high and the promise of hardware not this year but next, it is tough to really get a good understanding of exactly what's going on and what the implications of this hardware could be if they can deliver on what they say they can. We'll do our best to explain what we know and also what the pitfalls could be.

First, let's address the issue of the box we showed off in the previous coverage. No it will not need an external device. Lucid has designed this to be solution that can be dropped onto a motherboard or a graphics card so integration and user experience should be seamless.

This would be even more transparent than SLI and CrossFire because not even an internal bridge would be needed. Just plug any two cards from the same vendor (and i think they also need to use the same driver version though this is less than clear) and performance will scale linearly with the capabilities of each card.

They did mention the fact that they can implement a solution in an external box for notebooks. For those who need something portable but want high end graphics at home, they could just attach the graphics cards linked with a Hyrda 100 (via PCIe over cables) to the notebook. Not ideal, but it still offers some advantages over high end internal cards (especially in the area of heat) that you might not need when you're on the road.

Sound too good to be true? Yes. Did we see it working? Sure. Do we have performance numbers? Not yet. So there's the rub for us. We really want to put this thing through its paces before we sign off on it. Running on both UT3 and Crysis (DX9 only for now -- DX10 before the product ships though) is cool, but claiming application agnostic linear scaling over an arbitrary number of GPUs of differing capability is a tough pill to swallow without independent confirmation.

We asked them for hardware, and we really hope they'll get us some sooner rather than later. They seemed interested in letting us test it as well. Even if we can't publish numbers on it, it would go a long way for us being more excited about the product if we could run our own benchmarks on it just to see for ourselves.

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