ASUS Accidentally Builds The World's First Hybrid Radeon-GeForce Graphics Card

If you read that headline and got excited while thinking we were seeing the return of LucidLogix and its "Hydra" or "Virtu" technology, then I'm sorry to say this isn't nearly that cool. It is pretty funny, though: a Redditor purchased a new ASUS TUF Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB card and found that while it had the correct branding on the backplate, it had the cooler shroud applied for an ASUS TUF GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

Redditor /u/Fantastic-Ad8410 posted a couple of times to Reddit about issues he was having with his new Radeon card, which he says ran cool and worked fine as long as he didn't attempt to connect two monitors at once. Finally deciding it was a hardware fault, he decided to return the card to Micro Center and exchange it for a new one. Having done so, he got home, unboxed the card, and probably thought initially that it was entirely the wrong card altogether. Happily, he reports that it's just a manufacturing error and the card itself works flawlessly, including with both monitors connected.

It's not hard to see how this kind of mistake could happen. After all, the Radeon RX 9070 XT and GeForce RTX 5070 Ti are rather similar GPUs, both in terms of performance and in terms of power draw. It makes perfect sense that ASUS would use the same heatsinks for both, and the parts are assuredly fabricated before they are assembled into working GPUs, so with that context it becomes very easy to understand how a GPU here or there could get a mismatched backplate or heatsink.


Indeed, this isn't even the first time that this has happened. About a month ago, another Redditor (/u/Blood-Wolfe) posted about nearly the exact opposite thing: getting an ASUS TUF GeForce RTX 5070 Ti card that has a Radeon-branded cooler affixed. He was less than pleased with the confusion, although he also reported that the card was fully functional. Interestingly, the two cards seem to have the same heatsink design, so maybe there's some relation in the two incidents?

Sadly neither of these events is as interesting or exciting as real multi-vendor multi-GPU was back in the day, but writing as someone who actually tried LucidLogix's technology back in the day, I can report that it really didn't work that well. Coordinating rendering across two GPUs with the same architecture from the same vendor is hard enough; coordinating computing across multiple disparate GPU brands was nearly impossible without considerable overhead. The days of multi-GPU gaming glory will sadly remain consigned to history.