Nvidia goes Mental
NVIDIA IS LAYING OUT some big bucks to purchase the amusingly-named Mental Images.
The Berlin-based visual effects studio has one major product, the Oscar-winning Mental Ray software used in film special effects.
The speculation? That Nvidia is going to bring in the Mental Images software tools folks to create higher-quality in-game graphics tools.
The more likely story? Given that Mental counts Lucasfilm, Sony Pictures and Dreamworks amongst its customers, optimising the software for Nvidia and selling systems (complete with Quadro and Cuda systems) to animation houses is too nice a synergy to pass up.
No word on how much money changed hands or who Rolf Herken, the CEO of Mental, will be reporting to beyond Nvidia's 'Leadership team'. We'll be poking around to see what we can find. ยต
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that ray-tracing might be the next big thing, so bringing in some experts will help them prepare.
...is such a wide and complex kettle 'o' fish that when any chip company says they have a h/w ray-tracing solution you have to ask 'Oh yeah - what aspects of ray-tracing do you cover?

RT ray-tracing is currently just marketing hype for the ignorant and will remain so for quite a few years yet.
no doubt amd/ati will try and counter this move by doing something daft like buying Ageia.

download hypershot at www.bunkspeed.com/hypershot
Is not about gaming hype machine, is about GPU asisted rendering, integrating as may features of mental ray onto nVidia Gelato render engine to make a viable alternative to CPU only render.