Stephen Alvarez is a remarkable photographer and Mediaworkstations.net customer fully embracing the immersive 3D experience afforded through photogrammetry in his site https://ancientartarchive.org/.  Stephen contacted us last year about building the fastest computer for photogrammetry, and we spoke with him about how his i-X has helped him build this stunning site which provides something akin to a VR experience of the world’s oldest art.

We build the photogrammetry models using different programs, mostly Agisoft Photoscan, sometimes AutoDesk Remake and occasionally we will work with the models in Blender…high res for preservation and pulling video, lower res for online delivery through Sketchfab.

We will then “fly” cameras through the textured models to produce video for demo and display. There are a bunch of programs to do that with but the easiest is Remake.  Of course the whole Adobe Creative Cloud suite of programs comes into play….

 

The i-X is the fastest computer for photogrammetry I’ve used and thank god because the modeling I’m doing is getting more and more complex. My site https://ancientartarchive.org/ will have 2,000+ DSLR images when we are done. Without the overclocked power of the i-X I couldn’t even contemplate work like this.

For more about Stephen’s work see his Microsoft Stories profile at https://news.microsoft.com/stories/people/stephen-alvarez.html.

 

If there was a time for tech innovation in the media, entertainment and design space greater than now I am not aware of it.  The advances in GPU technology and drive speed via NVMe alone have quintupled production capabilities in the past 4 years.  We are currently offering best in class technologies on both fronts, deskside or in the server room.

We are testing our new X24-SS (above) which features 24 NVMe SSD front hot swap storage capacity with dual Xeon E5 v4 class CPUs and up to 3TB of DDR4 ECC RAM and will available for order next Friday 3/3/17.  12K raw real time read and write is no issue with this kind of i/o horsepower.

All Mediaworkstations also now feature the Samsung 960 Pro series m.2 SSDs, for boot or media drive.  Samsung has lit the NAND storage space on fire the past 3 years.  The 960 Pro offers 3.5GB/s reads and 2.1 GB/s write speeds – this is a 40% read speed increase and 25% write speed increase over the previous gen 950 Pro, and is faster than any workstation level solution by HP, Dell or Lenovo at the price.

ALSO:  Redesigned i-X2

That’s right.  The i-X2 has new armor.  Our most popular workstation will have improved airflow, increased cabin space for components and cooling, and the ability to accommodate 4 double wide GPUs such as the GTX 1070, 1080, Quadro P5000 and P6000 or an astounding SEVEN of AMD’s new Radeon WX 7100 GPUs,  which can outperform even 4x TitanX in OpenCL scenarios.

The i-X2 is incredibly powerful AND compact – it measures just 17” x 13.3” x 20”.

The DEAL

Hope to see you at GDC!