mental images®, founded in 1986, is the recognized international leader in providing rendering and 3D modeling technology to the entertainment, computer-aided design, scientific visualization, architecture, and other industries that require sophisticated images. Its products include the high-performance, photorealistic rendering software mental ray®, which produces images of amazing realism from computer-aided design and digital content creation data by relying on patented and proprietary ray tracing algorithms. mental ray is currently integrated in Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk® Maya®, Autodesk® Softimage®, Autodesk® VIZ, Autodesk® Inventor®, Autodesk® AutoCAD®, and Autodesk® Revit®.

The upcoming mental ray 3.8 includes iray®, the world’s first interactive and physically correct, photorealistic rendering solution. With iray, users can quickly create life-like images of their creations by using intuitive, real world approaches and interactively exploring their results through the processing power of NVIDIA® graphics processing units (GPUs). iray accelerates the creative process by accurately simulating the physical world, enabling designers, engineers and consumers to use materials, lighting and settings that truly resemble what they experience every day. iray makes this process interactive by progressively refining the image until the desired detail is achieved, becoming increasingly faster as more GPUs are employed, enabling the play of light, shadow and reflection to be studied. With iray, interactive realism is now a reality.

iray works with standard multi-core CPUs, however CUDA enabled GPU hardware will significantly accelerate the final image generation and provide interactive convergence of complex global illumination effects. Customers of mental ray 3.8, or applications that integrate mental ray 3.8, will have the option of exposing iray.