Nvidia has announced improvements to its
second generation of its workstation platform, Nvidia Maximus, that now include
support for include its Kepler-based graphics processing units (GPUs) that
offer the company's fastest, most efficient solutions.
The
introduction is important for broadcasters and content producers because
processing and speed improvements in graphics processing units in recent years
has led to dramatic improvements in broadcast graphics, virtual sets, special
effects, video processing and other solutions used by the production and TV
sectors. Such improvements have also helped lower the costs of many of these
solutions.
Nvidia
first introduced the Maximus platform in November. It speeds up processing by
giving users the ability to simultaneously perform complex analysis and
visualization on a single machine, noted Greg Estes, industry executive for
media and entertainment at Nvidia, in an interview. By simultaneously handling
interactive graphics and the computing required to simulate or render them, the
platform streamlines workflows.
With
the second generation of Maximus, computational 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.
The
Nvidia Quadro K5000 GPU's features also
include "bindless textures" that give users the ability to reference over 1
million textures directly in memory while reducing CPU overhead, which could
result in significant improvements in such broadcast technologies as virtual
sets and graphics.
It
also uses FXAA/TXAA film-style anti-aliasing technologies to improve image
quality.
Second
generation NVIDIA Maximus-powered desktop workstations featuring the new NVIDIA
Quadro K5000 will have a suggested manufacturers retail price of $2,249 when
they become available in December; the system with the Nvidia Tesla K20 GPU will run $3,199.
