Imagination Technologies has announced the Caustic Visualizer viewport plug-in for Autodesk Maya 2013*. Imagination will be demonstrating Caustic Visualizer’s highly interactive full-frame performance on the new PowerVR low-power ray tracing hardware reference platform at this week's SIGGRAPH show.

Imagination’s Caustic Visualizer family revolutionizes the performance and functionality of the interactive visual look development process by making ray-traced photorealistic rendering, from the start, an integral part of the content creation work flow, according to Tony King-Smith of Imagination. It's built entirely on the Imagination PowerVR OpenRL platform.

"Through OpenRL’s highly optimized CPU implementation, Caustic Visualizer can deliver an interactive photorealistic viewport experience on a CPU-only desktop that was previously only possible in competitive solutions based on expensive quad-GPU hardware configurations," Smith says. "Furthermore, when coupled with OpenRL running on the new PowerVR ray-tracing hardware reference platform, Caustic’s Visualizer software can deliver true full-frame (1024x1024) resolution imagery up to 15 photorealistic frames per second, without the need to de-res the image or add significant noise during interaction."

The plug-in is compatible with Maya's Point, Spot, Directional and Area Light types. A beta version of Caustic’s Visualizer for Maya is available now for Maya 2013 64-bit and may be downloaded for free from the Caustic Professional website at visualizer.caustic.com . Just remember: beta software is unfinished software so use with care.