LucidLogix graphics processor company closes a third round funding: $18 million in the basket

The Israeli graphic processor startup company LucidLogix Technologies raised a third round financing valued at $18 million.
The round was led by Rho Ventures together with Genesis Partners and Giza Venture Capital (Intel Capital didn’t participate this time as they did the last time). The company has raised $35 million to date.

About LucidLogix

LucidLogix president and VP business development Offir Remez, CTO Dr. Reuven Bakalash, and 3D graphics technology expert Efi Fogel founded the company at technology incubator Maayan Ventures Ltd.  George Haber (from Romanian origins) joined soon after as chairman.

George Haber is a well known tech entrepreneur in this field.
Do you remember CompCore (acquired by Zoran) and Gigapixel (acquired by 3Dfx)? Gigapixel, especially, was a company which revolutionized the 3D graphic processing technologies. That made 3Dfx (the company which started the 3D craze) to buy Gigapixel back in 2000 and incorporate into its products (the company was eventually bought by nVidia and then dismissed).

Now, with LucidLogix, he’s back with a vengeance. The company designed a new approach to boost the performance of a graphic chip by creating The HYDRA Engine.

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In their words:

The HYDRA Engine by Lucid is a patented system-on-a-chip designed to boost graphics performance in any multi-GPU environment, from mainstream to the most complex. Placed between a PC’s chipset and GPUs, the HYDRA Engine smartly directs graphics processing traffic between the GPUs, using several intelligent parallelization algorithms.

The result? Lower costs, better graphics, more responsiveness, and more power and fun for you – even with the most complex 3D scenes, animations or car chases frenetically flashing across your screen. The HYDRA Engine is the first solution that “plays well with others.” Unlike other technologies, it is completely compatible with all gaming applications, chipsets and GPUs from any vendor, so you can develop a totally customizable PC solution.

Our goal is to make photorealistic graphics mainstream and affordable for everyone on graphics-enabled platforms, including PCs, notebooks and gaming consoles. Consumers and manufacturers can deploy the HYDRA Engine:

* On motherboards
* As an add-in board

Being just a casual intensive 3D gamer (not much free time) I can’t wait to see this technology implemented in future computers (it could help when you have 3D intensive applications also).

The chip is expected to be available in the first half of 2009.