NVIDIA has announced new releases of its Application Acceleration Engines (AXE), optimized for the newest Quadro graphics processing units (GPUs) based on the company's new NVIDIA Fermi architecture, which were launched today.

These latest versions, designed for the professional software development community, include: NVIDIA SceniX 6, NVIDIA Cg Tooklit 3, and NVIDIA OptiX 2. Also on display today is the iray renderer from mental images, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDIA, being shown in commercial applications as well as a breakthrough GPU cloud-based rendering solution.

"These new Engine releases enable groundbreaking applications to come to market far faster than before," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA. "And they open the door to a new generation of software which combines advanced visualization with high performance computing and simulation."

NVIDIA Accelerates the Pace of Development SceniX 6, Cg Toolkit 3, OptiX 2 technology, and iray rendering solutions from mental images, offer application developers a host of new features and benefits that they can offer to end-users across a broad range of markets, including medical imaging, automotive styling, architectural design and energy exploration. New features and benefits include:

NVIDIA SceniX 6

• New Bezier Patch geometry class, using Cg tessellation programs for the smoothest of   surfaces on NVIDIA Fermi architecture class GPUs;
• OptiX 2 support for faster, interactive ray tracing;
• Continued improvements in overall performance and fidelity, and;
• Future support for iray by mental images.

NVIDIA Cg Toolkit 3

• New tessellation programs, allowing displacement and procedural surfaces to dynamically adapt their tessellation in real-time on the latest NVIDIA Fermi architecture class GPUs, and;
• OpenGL 4 and DirectX 11 level of programmability for the latest in portable, cross platform effects.

NVIDIA OptiX 2

• Optimizations for new NVIDIA Fermi architecture class GPUs, delivering up to 4X performance over previous generation (GT200) GPUs and > 10X over G92;
• Support for all NVIDIA CUDA architecture-capable NVIDIA GPUs (G92 or later) on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, and;
• Direct3D and fast interoperability in Direct3D and OpenGL; for flexible compositing and hybrid rendering opportunities.

iray from mental images

• Physically correct and fully deterministic global illumination rendering;
• Superb scaling between multiple NVIDIA Fermi architecture class GPUs on the same machine, and;
• Distributed rendering support for efficiently leveraging multiple Quadro and Tesla GPUs in a network.

Development Community Enthusiastic About New Engines "We have found that our customers are very interested in how GPU acceleration will improve their rendering experiences, and NVIDIA engines are powering our development process to bring them compelling, new Lightworks solutions," said Dave Hutchinson, Product Director at Lightwork Design Limited. "We found the OptiX ray tracing engine straightforward to implement, and have seen very impressive rendering speed-ups compared with traditional CPU implementations."

"SceniX has been a foundation for our industry-leading Delta Gen styling and visualization product since its beginning," said Ludwig Fuchs, CEO of Real Time Technologies Inc. "Each version of SceniX has enabled us to quickly provide important new functionality and performance to our highly discriminating customer base of automotive companies, and we see version 6 doing so once again."

"iray has allowed us to easily add a rendering solution to our new Bunkspeed SHOT software, making it truly state of the art in both photorealism and speed," said Philip Lunn, CEO of Bunkspeed. "The breakthrough new Quadro GPUs, in combination with Bunkspeed SHOT is poised to revolutionize the creative process for our customers in design and advertising."

Availability NVIDIA Application Acceleration Engines are available immediately to developers for download. OptiX, SceniX and the Cg Toolkit are free to acquire and deploy.