Matt Puchala has announced the release of Axiom 2.1 for Houdini, the latest version of his volumetric fluid simulator that can run true sparse simulations fully on a GPU for the fast creation of fire, smoke, and other pyrotechnic effects. The new version focuses on performance with a 10-25% faster overall performance, the ability to simulate more than 500 million voxels with a new max of 2 billion voxels, the “Speed” mode is now more memory efficient with around 13m voxels per GB, option for 16-bit float memory downloads (before all simulation grids were downloaded as 32-bit floats. This makes memory downloads from the GPU twice as fast),a new option for source shapes world / object space noise, a new option for source shapes noise offsets, and more. Find out more about Axiom on the product’s website.