Software developers seeking better graphics in their applications no doubt will be interested in Amazon Web Services Inc.’s latest offering.

The public cloud giant has just announced general availability of its Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs for Windows, which attach to Elastic Compute Cloud instances in order to accelerate graphics performance in applications by tapping the power of graphics processing units.

Amazon said its Elastic GPUs are best suited for applications that support the OpenGL standard, and require a small or intermittent amount of additional GPU power for graphics acceleration.

OpenGL is a cross-language, multiplatform application programming interface for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. Its developers claim it’s the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API in the industry, used extensively in applications such as computer-aided design, virtual reality, scientific visualization, flight simulation and video games.

Amazon said its Elastic GPUs support the latest OpenGL 3.3 API standards, and will benefit from expanded API support soon. “You can use Elastic GPUs with many instance types allowing you the flexibility to choose the right compute, memory, and storage balance for your application,” AWS Cloud Senior Technical Evangelist Randall Hunt wrote in a blog post.

At launch, AWS Elastic GPUs are available in four sizes – medium (1-gigabyte), large (2GB), xlarge (4GB) and 2xlarge (8GB). Currently they’re only available to customers in Amazon’s us-east-1 and us-east-2 regions, though Amazon they’ll be made available in more regions later.

Amazon reckons its Elastic GPUs are a lower-cost alternative to its G2 and G3 GPU instance types for OpenGL 3.3 applications, with pricing starting at 5 cents an hour for the smallest type, medium.

Image: AWS