mental images Unveils iray Rendering Solution
Enables Unbelievably Fast Photorealism for Design Professionals and Engineers Using NVIDIA GPUs
SANTA CLARA, Calif. and BERLIN, Germany - Sept. 30, 2009- mental images®, an NVIDIA company, today introduced iray® - the first fully GPU accelerated, commercially supported, turn-key rendering solution for a wide range of 3D graphics application developers. iray technology leverages NVIDIA® graphics processing units (GPUs) to deliver unbelievably fast photorealism to designers, engineers and consumers.
Life-like graphics can now become interactive as iray rendering technology exploits the massively parallel processing power of the GPU, enabling more convincing 3D visuals, greater levels of creativity and faster decision making.
"With iray rendering technology, what used to take product designers, visual effects artists and CAD users hours to render can now happen in a matter of minutes without compromising the quality and detail of the image, said Dr. Jon Peddie, president, Jon Peddie Research. "The advent of iray is changing the face of this industry by increasing the standards in rendering efficiency as we know it."
iray technology speeds the creative process by easily enabling designers to accurately simulate their creations using materials and lighting that relate directly to the physical world experienced every day. Because it's highly scalable, interactive and physically accurate, iray technology allows design and engineering professionals to produce the highest quality final-frame output without the complexity inherent in other solutions.
With tight integration with mental ray® technology - mental images' renderer, which is extensively used in feature film work and within the leading design and creation tools from Autodesk, Dassault Systmes and Parametric Technology - iray rendering technology will empower millions of users with the ability to change the way they create synthetic images.
"The combination of iray and NVIDIA GPUs is an astounding achievement, demonstrating our undisputed leadership in computational graphics," said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president, NVIDIA Professional Solutions Group. "The ease-of-use and remarkable speed of iray brings interactive photorealism easily within the reach of any creator or consumer of 3D content."
iray rendering technology significantly improves how designers, engineers and other content development professionals work with rendering tools to produce high-quality, photorealistic imagery. Harnessing the power of the GPU and the NVIDIA CUDA(TM) parallel processing architecture, iray technology progressively refines an image until maximum detail is reached, providing a single process that smoothly combines interactive pre-visualization and final frame rendering. iray technology requires only a small number of intuitive settings relating to the physical world that delivers a "push-button" rendering experience for creating final-frame photo-real images.
"It's no secret that users want to utilize the power of GPUs for photorealistic rendering," said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO, mental images. "With iray, we deliver a solution that not only leverages the GPU in the most efficient manner but also raises the bar for what is defined as photorealism in rendering."
Pricing and Availability
iray rendering technology will be included with mental ray 3.8 starting in late November 2009 at no extra cost to existing customers and OEMs under maintenance. iray technology will also be available as part of RealityServer® 2.4, the upcoming release of the 3D web application services software. A future iray Integrator Edition will allow independent software vendors to include iray technology within their own products, while future integration with the NVIDIA SceniX(TM) scene management engine will make iray technology easily accessible to all SceniX-based applications. For more information about iray, please visit www.mentalimages.com/iray.
About mental images
mental images, founded in 1986, is the recognized international leader in providing component and platform software for the creation, manipulation and visualization of 3D content. Its world leading rendering and other technologies are used by the entertainment, computer-aided design, architecture, scientific visualization, and other industries that require sophisticated images primarily as part of their software products and application services. mental images is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDIA Corp. with headquarters in Berlin, Germany, a subsidiary in the United States, mental images, Inc., and a subsidiary in Melbourne, Australia, mental images Pty. mental images has a multinational staff of top qualified engineers exclusively dedicated to basic research and development in the area of 3D graphics and 3D Web Applications and Services technologies. For more information, visit www.mentalimages.com.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from portable media players to notebooks to workstations. NVIDIA's expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. Fortune magazine has ranked NVIDIA #1 in innovation in the semiconductor industry for two years in a row. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.
