Fusion-io today announced that the ioXtreme has increased data performance by up to six times for the Maya Composite high dynamic range compositing component of Autodesk Maya 2010 software. In testing, the ioXtreme out-performed an enterprise-class, four-drive RAID by more than 200 percent. The dramatic performance increase gives filmmakers, compositors, editors, and artists using high-end 2D and 3D applications the power to review their work in full quality and real time, improving productivity and facilitating greater creative freedom.
Until now, only those with massive studio budgets could achieve these kinds of performance levels using expensive, striped disk subsystems for performance. Otherwise, artists and developers have to composite and playback in reduced resolution or at slower frame rates — or move their work to a shared workstation to view it in real time, which limits productivity and can stifle the creative process.
When supercharged with the ioXtreme, 3D artists can use Maya Composite to check their final images and pre-comps and compositors can work in full resolution and playback their work interactively without being bound by the amount of RAM on their workstation.
In addition, the increased performance offered with the ioXtreme means that artists working in stereoscopic 3D can for the first time preview shots at their own workstations, substantially streamlining the iterative process and creating the conditions for artists to take the medium to new levels.
“Performance enhancement solutions like the ioXtreme will help unleash the power of Autodesk Maya 2010 and the Maya Composite functionality at the workstation,” said Rob Hoffmann, senior product marketing manager, Autodesk Media & Entertainment. “The ioXtreme and our applications taken together have the ability to radically alter how the production pipeline works. Imagine every workstation having the ability to create, playback, composite and even edit your content, eliminating the need for expensive disk arrays, streamlining production schedules and giving artists greater freedom to create in real time. With an ioXtreme artists don’t have to resort to proxies or painfully slow playback and they don’t have to compromise quality for speed.”
Drawing from Fusion-io’s industry-leading solid-state technologies, the ioXtreme is a PCI Express card that sits on the system bus filling the performance gap between RAM and disk drives. It adds 80 GB of non-volatile capacity, exponentially accelerating input and output, including file access, and improving application performance dramatically.
“Maya is the perfect solution to demonstrate what our ioXtreme can do for workstation users in the media arts,” said Tyler Smith, vice-president of business development for Fusion-io. “With innovations like ours and the innovations Autodesk releases, smaller production shops will have the ability to be as productive as bigger studios, and bigger studios will be more efficient than ever before.”
About Fusion-io
Fusion-io is a leading provider of enterprise solid-state technology and high-performance I/O solutions. The company’s solid-state storage technology closes the gap between processing power and traditional storage, delivering a new type of application centric storage for database, application and system administrators. The result is a world of possibilities for performancestarved applications.
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