Imagination Technologies teams up with Lenovo to certify the Caustic Series2 R2500 and R2100 ray-tracing acceleration on Lenovo ThinkStations.
San Francisco, CA -- Imagination Technologies announced its Caustic Series2 R2500 and R2100 ray-tracing acceleration boards are now certified on Lenovo’s ThinkStation D30 and S30 workstations.
Imagination’s Caustic Visualizer family, combined with its new Caustic Series2 add-in boards for workstations, redefine price performance standards and the functionality of the interactive visual look development process. Together they make ray-traced photorealistic rendering an integral part of the content creation workflow from the start. Offering acceleration speed rates across popular media and CAD 3D applications that can be five times faster than the already impressive performance of the Caustic Visualizer software, the Series2 boards provide an ideal upgrade path for artists and designers using Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, or Robert McNeel & Associates Rhino 5.
“We remain focused on what the end goal represents for designers and artists – a faster and highly productive workflow is a true asset,” says Tom Salomone, manufacturing and AEC segment manager at Lenovo. “Lenovo ThinkStation’s exceptional performance and superior reliability combined with the newly certified Caustic Series2 ray-tracing accelerator boards, provides an extremely fast platform for our ray tracing customers.”
The Lenovo ThinkStation D30 and S30 workstations were tested with the Caustic Series2 R2500 and R2100 cards during a rigorous process at Imagination’s Caustic Professional San Francisco headquarters. The certification process consisted of ensuring the PCIe compatibility, bandwidth, functionality, power management and performance (covering all of the PCIe slots) all passed Lenovo’s professional standards.
“Since it is very important to us that our customers enjoy optimized experiences when they use their Series2 boards, we created a certification program that will guarantee this with our hardware partners,” says Alex Kelley, director of business development for Imagination Technologies. “Lenovo also shares our drive to create the very best experience for our customers, so we are very excited to have them join our growing list of A-level industry partners.”
Caustic’s Visualizer for Maya and 3ds Max is a plug-in for Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max 2013 that enables artists to create 3D content within a fully interactive ray traced viewport. By providing a much higher degree of visual fidelity than Maya's standard rasterized viewport, including accurate global illumination, reflections and shadows, Visualizer for Maya enables artists to identify and resolve potential problems from the earliest stages of modelling, minimizing the need for time-consuming preview renders and radically streamlining the look development process.
Caustic Visualizer utilizes Imagination’s PowerVR Brazil SDK v1.0, a high-level rendering software toolkit built using OpenRL for adding photorealistic visualization into 3D graphics applications. It is a completely new implementation of the technology in the award-winning Brazil final frame renderer, designed from the ground-up to leverage Imagination’s OpenRL API and high-performance ray-tracing technologies to deliver real-time interactivity on any platform.
Source: Imagination Technologies
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
