Even as Nvidia's workstation division demonstrates recent growth, it continues to push high end graphics for design and creative professionals. Today the company announced the availability of its new Maximus software that enables the pairing of Quadro and Tesla GPUs on the same workstation, which allows the machine to handle graphics intensive and computational work in parallel. The new driver technology utilizes Quadro for its 3D capabilities while Tesla does all the calculations, allowing each GPU to focus on the computations it does best. According to Nvidia, this is ideal for live rendering, video editing, and numerical analysis with MATLAB.

The reasoning behind Maximus is that while Quadro is fully capable of both tasks, it's not suited for doing both at the same time. In addition, Nvidia is creating a market for professionals who don't need the graphics capabilities of the highest end Quadro, but would benefit from the computational power of a Tesla GPU. Just looking to eke a higher framerate out of Battlefield 3? Maximus probably isn't for you — but business users will be happy to know it's now available on workstations from HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Fujitsu starting at around $2,700 for a Quadro 600 and Tesla C2075 pairing.