Imagination Tech Ships Caustic Series2 R2500, R2100

Imagination Technologies is now shipping its Caustic Series2 PC boards, the R2500 and R2100, which accelerate PowerVR OpenRL applications including the Caustic Visualizer viewport plug-ins for Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, and the Neon viewport in Rhinoceros 5 from Robert McNeel and Associates.

The Caustic Series2 is a family of high-performance ray tracing accelerator PC boards. The Caustic R2500 OpenRL PC board is targeted at the latest high-end workstations. The Caustic R2100 board is intended for upgrading a wider range of mid-range and higher workstations.

For a limited period of time both Caustic boards ship with a free copy of Caustic Visualizer for Maya. A 3ds Max Visualizer will be available in Q2 2013, with beta trials from March 2013.

The boards include 4G and 16G of memory, respectively, which is used to store scene geometry and the ray tracing acceleration structure. Shading is performed by the CPU. Shader materials like texture maps are stored in memory on the workstation, freeing up the ray tracing hardware to store very large models, the company says.

The Caustic Visualizer viewport renderer interactively updates and responds to all edits in 3ds Max and Maya including geometry, lighting and shading characteristics while preserving their powerful interactive workflows. Selected objects in the Maya viewport continue to have fully editable wireframes and manipulators overlaid on the real-time ray-traced shaded preview.

For more information, visit Imagination Technologies.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.