iray photorealism, accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs, becomes part of the design process in CATIA V6

SAN FRANCISCO and BERLIN, Nov. 23 -- mental images, a global leader in rendering software and visualization tools, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDIA, announced today that its iray rendering technology is integrated into Dassault Systèmes CATIA V6, the 3D collaborative design solution. With iray rendering technology leveraging the parallel processing power of NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) certified for CATIA V6, product designers, engineers and marketing professionals can, right within CATIA, interactively create stunningly photorealistic images of their designs in record time.

"As everyone needs to communicate their ideas clearly and most powerfully, high quality photorealistic imaging has become increasingly essential. With V6, a 3D product is experienced as it looks in real life. Product design and innovation professionals have a strong need for intuitive interactive photorealistic visualization to be an integral part of the design process," said Jacques Leveillé-Nizerolle, CATIA CEO, Dassault Systèmes. "With mental images' iray renderer, CATIA V6 gives casual users, visualization experts, and styling review participants the ability to quickly and easily have a visual lifelike experience of their product as well as to produce physically correct 3D images directly from their working environment, throughout the creation and collaboration phases of their design."

iray rendering technology is available in the CATIA Live Rendering workbench for V6R2011x. It empowers users across multiple industries, including automotive design, industrial engineering, architectural visualization and consumer products design, to create and manipulate seamlessly photorealistic visualization at any moment in the design process without having to wait long for the image to render. High quality product and device styling, design checks and creative marketing materials can be created in a fraction of the time previously required by leveraging the hundreds of parallel processing cores inside the new NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics and Tesla high performance computing (HPC) solutions. Both are NVIDIA CUDA technology enabled and based on the new NVIDIA Fermi architecture.

iray technology provides easy "push button" rendering for designers and engineers so they can focus on their workflow and not on tedious render preparations. With just a few intuitive settings, users can easily create photorealistic images with perfectly simulated real-world lighting and materials, including the subtle effects of indirect illumination and refraction, which are critical to achieving realism.

"The integration of iray into CATIA V6 brings an unprecedented level of performance and realism to the product design world," said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. "iray dramatically closes the gap between the conceptual design process and how things actually look in the real world."

CATIA V6 users can harness the interactive photorealistic rendering capabilities of iray technology through the CATIA Live Rendering workbench, which is now part of the CATIA Rendering and CATIA Industrial Design Products.

About mental images

mental images, founded in 1986, is a recognized international leader in providing component and platform software for the creation, manipulation and visualization of 3D content. Its 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 the NVIDIA Corporation with headquarters in Berlin, Germany, a subsidiary in the United States, mental images, Inc., and a subsidiary in Melbourne, Australia, mental images Pty Ltd. 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 GPU in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from tablets and portable media players to notebooks and workstations. NVIDIA's expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. The company holds more than 1,600 patents worldwide, including ones covering designs and insights that are essential to modern computing. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.

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Source: NVIDIA Corp.