Imagination Technologies announces Caustic ray-tracing hardware certification on Lenovo workstations

San Francisco, CA, 2 April, 2013: Imagination Technologies (IMG.L), a leading multimedia, processor, communications and cloud technologies company, announces 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.”

Pricing and Availability

Lenovo’s ThinkStation S30 and D30 workstations are available now, and priced at US $1,149 and $1,569 respectively.

The Caustic R2500 OpenRL PC board is priced at US $1,495, targeting the latest high-end workstations. The Caustic R2100 board is priced at an aggressive US $795, 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. The software-only version of the Caustic Visualizer for Maya is separately priced at US $299. Rhino 5.0 customers can download the “Neon” plug-in, which uses the same OpenRL-based ray-tracing acceleration platform as Caustic Visualizer (See: http://v5.rhino3d.com/group/neon).

Caustic Visualizer

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.

PowerVR Brazil SDK v1.0

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.

OpenRL

OpenRL is a flexible low-level, platform-independent ray-tracing API designed to facilitate high-performance interactive ray-tracing using both software and hardware accelerated renderers. It is available today as a free SDK that includes a software implementation running on x86 devices. It is being integrated by a rapidly growing number of ISVs in rendering applications for a wide range of markets, including digital content creation, film and video, games, architecture, and industrial design. See: http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/powervr_openrl_raytracing_technology.asp.

This cross-OS, cross-platform API is the only ray tracing API that can support a broad and growing range of processors, accelerators and GPUs with optimal performance. Like OpenGL, OpenRL hides the complexities of interfacing with different devices by presenting a single, uniform interface. A free perpetual license of OpenRL is available for both commercial and non-commercial applications.

About Caustic Professional

Caustic Professional is part of Imagination Technologies, a global leader in multimedia and communications technologies. Based in San Francisco, Caustic Professional is changing how interactive cinema-quality 3D graphics are produced, used, and enjoyed.

Caustic Professional’s solutions use the OpenRL API and are based on unique and patented PowerVR ray-tracing technologies, which fundamentally change the performance and cost metrics for production-quality ray-traced images and animated content without cutting corners for quality or functionality. Thanks to the cross-platform features of OpenRL, future generations of Caustic Professional’s products will migrate seamlessly from workstations to future generations of mobile and embedded platforms utilizing Imagination’s future PowerVR IP cores incorporating Imagination’s innovative ray tracing technologies.

About Lenovo

Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) is a $US30 billion personal technology company – and the second largest PC company in the world, serving customers in more than 160 countries. Dedicated to building exceptionally engineered PCs and mobile internet devices, Lenovo’s business is built on product innovation, a highly-efficient global supply chain and strong strategic execution. Formed by Lenovo Group’s acquisition of the former IBM Personal Computing Division, the company develops, manufactures and markets reliable, high-quality, secure and easy-to-use technology products and services. Its product lines include legendary Think-branded commercial PCs and Idea-branded consumer PCs, as well as servers, workstations, and a family of mobile internet devices, including tablets and smart phones. Lenovo has major research centers in Yamato, Japan; Beijing, China; and Raleigh, North Carolina. For more information, see www.lenovo.com.

About Imagination Technologies

Imagination Technologies - a global leader in multimedia, processor and communication technologies - creates and licenses market-leading processor solutions including graphics, video, vision, CPU & embedded processing, multi-standard communications, cross-platform V.VoIP & VoLTE and cloud connectivity. These silicon and software intellectual property (IP) solutions for systems-on-chip (SoC) are complemented by an extensive portfolio of software, tools and ecosystems. Target markets include mobile phone, connected home consumer, mobile and tablet computing, in-car electronics, networking, telecoms, health, smart energy and connected sensors. Imagination's licensees include many of the world's leading semiconductor manufacturers, network operators and OEM/ODMs. Corporate headquarters are located in the United Kingdom, with sales and R&D offices worldwide. See: www.imgtec.com.