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 the first family of high performance ray tracing accelerator PC boards using Imagination’s unique ray tracing technologies in the world’s first chipset dedicated to high performance, fully interactive ray tracing in a workstation environment.

Says Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination: “Ray-traced rendering is now no longer limited to non-real-time applications and server farms. By enabling totally interactive, fully ray-traced viewport environments Caustic Series2 is a truly disruptive innovation in the field of high-quality and photorealistic content generation and revolutionizes the workflow of creative professionals.”

Says Alex Kelley, Caustic's director of business development: “We are thrilled to bring this kind of targeted ray tracing hardware to the industry at an affordable price. The Caustic R2500 and R2100 will accelerate look development for artists and designers to a level where they can view final render results while still developing their models. Artists and design professionals will love all of the extra time they'll have to be more creative."

The Caustic R2500 and R2100 ray tracing accelerator boards and Caustic Visualizer for Maya plug-in are available for purchase from today at store.caustic.com.

Imagination’s Caustic R2500 and R2100 boards are qualified for relevant Dell and HP workstations (full details of qualified systems can be found at www.caustic.com/series2/qualification). Qualification for other systems, including Boxx, and Lenovo is expected in Q1 2013.

Featuring Imagination’s unique Caustic RT2 custom chips, the R2500 and R2100 PCIe boards set new standards for price performance, with up to 5x acceleration (over software alone) across popular media and CAD 3D applications, as well as significantly lower power consumption. They are an ideal upgrade path for users wishing to use tools such as Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, or Robert McNeel & Associates Rhino 5, to create stunning 3D content in a totally interactive, fully ray-traced viewport environment.

The Caustic boards set a new standard for affordable, high performance ray tracing and revolutionize workflows for creative professionals. Now it is possible to immediately see the effects of changes made without having to wait for rendering; iteration takes moments not minutes.

The Caustic R2100 and R2500 boards include 4 Gigabytes and 16 Gigabytes of memory, respectively, which is used to store scene geometry and the ray tracing acceleration structure. Unlike most GPU solutions, 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 - often a requirement for applications in CAD or film and post production.

"At Autodesk University 2012, Imagination Technologies debuted their real-time, interactive ray tracing with the Series2 ray tracing boards, which accelerate the capabilities of Caustic Visualizer plugins for Maya and 3ds Max", said Robert Hoffmann, senior product marketing manager, Autodesk Media & Entertainment. "Our customer reaction was very positive, and we are pleased that Maya and 3ds Max users will be among the first to be able to take advantage of this new technology."