LOS ANGELES — At SIGGRAPH, Nvidia (www.nvidia.com) launched the second generation of its Maximus workstation platform, which now features the Kepler GPU architecture. Originally introduced last November, Maximus gives workstation users the ability to simultaneously perform complex analysis and visualization on a single machine.
With this second generation of Maximus, compute work is assigned to run on the new Nvidia Tesla K20 GPU computing accelerator, freeing up the new Nvidia Quadro K5000 GPU to handle graphics functions. Maximus unified technology transparently and automatically assigns visualization and simulation or rendering work to the right processor.
The Quadro K5000 GPU’s features include: Bindless Textures that give users the ability to reference over 1 million textures directly in memory while reducing CPU overhead; FXAA/TXAA film-style anti-aliasing technologies; Increased frame buffer capacity of 4GB, plus a next-generation PCIe-3 bus interconnect that accelerates data movement by 2x compared with PCIe-2; an all-new display engine capable of driving up to four displays simultaneously with a single K5000; and Display Port 1.2 support for resolutions up to 3840x2160 at 60Hz.
Key features of the Tesla K20 GPU include: SMX streaming multiprocessor technology for up to a 3x performance per watt advantage, and Dynamic Parallelism and Hyper-Q GPU technologies for simplified parallel programming and dramatically faster performance.
For the media and entertainment industry, Maximus gives digital content creators more freedom and creative flexibility. Film editors and animators can work in realtime on challenging projects, create complex simulations and interactive visual effects, and work in 3D texture painting workflows without being constrained by a maximum number of textures. Chaos Group and A52 are two studios that have already put Maximus technology to use in their respective workflows.
Second generation Maximus-powered desktop workstations featuring the new Quadro K5000 ($2,249) plus the Tesla K20 GPU ($3,199) will be available starting in December 2012. The Quadro K5000 will be available as a separate discrete desktop GPU starting in October 2012. HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Fujitsu, plus systems integrators such as Boxx Technologies and Supermicro, will all offer second generation Maximus-powered workstations.