The Caustic R2500 OpenRL PC board costs $1,495, targeting the latest high-end workstations. The Caustic R2100 board is priced at $795, intended for upgrading a wider range of mid-range and higher workstations.
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.”
The Caustic R2500 and R2100 ray tracing accelerator boards and Caustic Visualizer for Maya plug-in are available for purchase from today at https://store.caustic.com. For a limited period, both Caustic boards ship with a free copy of Caustic Visualizer for Maya. The software-only version of the Caustic Visualizer for Maya is separately priced at $299. A 3ds Max Visualizer will be available in the second quarter.
The Caustic R2100 and R2500 boards include 4GB 16GB 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.