NVIDIA Maximus Is a New Hybrid Graphics Solution

NVIDIA officially launched the Maximus technology, which promises professionals that their workstations will handle workloads much more intelligently and efficiently, provided the right parts are installed.

The Santa Clara, California-based company wants professionals to buy both Quadro and Tesla cards for their workstations.

The former is geared towards rendering the graphics, while Tesla is actually a GPU compute accelerator instead of a graphics adapter.

The new Maximus technology is a feature that supposedly assigns each GPU (graphics processing unit) the kind of workload it addresses best.

This means that systems will be able to easily carry out both interactive graphics tasks and computations at the same time.

“The real advantage of the Maximus technology is flexibility and increased productivity,” said Tim Ong, vice president of Mechanical Engineering for Sunnyvale, CA-based Liquid Robotics.

“Allowing each engineer to do multiple things at once is transformative for our workflow. It's a tremendous tool to allow my engineers to be flexible, to multitask, and to be more productive because they're not waiting on computational power.”

Some may notice that the principle is similar to the one behind the Optimus technology, which swaps between a CPU and a GPU instead of two GPUs.

Adobe, ANSYS, Autodesk, Bunkspeed, MathWorks and DassaultSystems all have Maximus-enabled applications, or soon will.

As for the hardware, HP, Dell, Lenovo and Fujitsu will sell, or already finished preparing, compatible machines.

“To those of us who have spent their careers focused on workstations, NVIDIA Maximus represents a revolution,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA.

“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.”