Nvidia Corp. this week introduced Maximus technology, which allows to combine Nvidia Quadro professional graphics accelerators and Nvidia Tesla compute accelerators on the same system to perform both graphics-intensive as well as compute-intensive tasks. The technology greatly simplifies work of creative professionals as it assigns the right workload to the right chip.

"To those of us who have spent their careers focused on workstations, Nvidia Maximus represents a revolution. Previous workstation architectures forced designers and engineers to do compute-intensive work and graphics-intensive work serially and often offline. They can now do them at the same time, on the same machine, allowing professionals to explore more ideas faster and converge quickly on the best possible answers," said Jeff Brown, general manager of professional solutions group at Nvidia.

Nvidia Maximus unleashes productivity and creativity, dramatically accelerating work by enabling a single system for the first time to simultaneously handle interactive graphics on Nvidia Quadro graphics cards and the compute-intensive number crunching associated with the simulation or rendering of the results on Nvidia Tesla C2075 compute co-processor (448 stream processors, 515GFLOPS DP performance, 1.03TFLOPS SP performance, 6GB GDDR5) thanks to a special driver. Previously, these tasks needed to be done in separate steps or on separate systems, but Maximus transparently assigns work to the right processor and is certified by industry leading application vendors.

With Nvidia Maximus-enabled applications, such as those from Adobe, Ansys, Autodesk, Bunkspeed, Dassault Systèmes and MathWorks, GPU compute work is assigned to run on the Nvidia Tesla companion processor, which frees up the Nvidia Quadro GPU to handle graphics functions, ensuring the quality and performance demanded by professional users.

"By harnessing the power of GPU computing we have been able to create a more productive, high-performance, interactive user experience and, at the same time, dramatically increase the realism of visualization tools available for designers and engineers within CATIA V6. With Nvidia Maximus, users will be able to experience the full power of these new visualization tools in their product design workflow," said Xavier Melkonian, director of Catia Shape Domain at Dassault Systèmes.

The world's leading workstation OEMs - including HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Fujitsu - are all offering workstations featuring Nvidia Maximus technology, available for configuration and purchase immediately.

"GPU computing can dramatically accelerate Ansys engineering software simulations on workstations, in some cases doubling the number of simulations that can be considered and helping customers to adopt more pervasive use of engineering simulation. With Nvidia Maximus platforms widely available, enterprises can now more easily take advantage of Ansys at their desk for both interactive and computationally intensive tasks," said Barbara Hutchings, director of strategic partnerships at Ansys.

"Autodesk's 3ds Max 2012 has received top scores by reviewers, and one of the reasons they cite is the new iray photorealistic renderer from Nvidia. We've taken this to another level with our announcement of the ActiveShade integration with iray - giving our subscription users an interactive rendering experience -- especially if they are using an Nvidia Quadro GPU, or the new Nvidia Maximus solution that's up to 9X faster than a single CPU," said Ken Pimentel, director of media design at Autodesk.

Tags: Nvidia, Maximus, Tesla, Quadro, GPGPU