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

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.