Mental Images

This article is about the computer graphics software company. For the psychological phenomenon, see Mental image.

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German software company

Mental Images GmbH

Company type| Subsidiary
Industry| CGI, Computer software
Founded| April 1986; 39 years ago (1986-04) in Berlin
Headquarters|

Berlin

Germany

Key people

| Rolf Herken (president, CEO, CTO)
Products| Mental Ray, RealityServer, mental mill, MetaSL, mental mesh, iray, DiCE

Number of employees

| 80
Parent| Nvidia
Website| mentalimages.com

Mental Images GmbH (stylized as mental images) was a German computer-generated imagery (CGI) software company based in Berlin, Germany. In 2007, Nvidia acquired the company and rebranded it as the Nvidia Advanced Rendering Center (ARC). The company continues to provide similar products and technology, offering rendering and 3D modeling technology for entertainment, computer-aided design, scientific visualization and architecture.

The company was founded in April 1986 in Berlin, Germany, by the physicists and computer scientists Rolf Herken, Hans-Christian Hege, Robert Hödicke and Wolfgang Krüger as well as the economists Günter Ansorge, Frank Schnöckel and Hans Peter Plettner. It was established as a company with limited liability & private limited partnership (GmbH & Co. KG). The Mental Ray software project was initiated in 1986. The first versions of the rendering software were influenced, tested and utilized by the then-sizable commercial computer animation division of Mental Images, which was led by the following visual effects supervisors: The 1991 and 1993 Academy Award winner John Andrew Berton (1986–1989), the 2000 and 2017 Academy Award winner John Nelson (1987–1989), and the 1996 and 2000 Academy Award nominee Stefen Fangmeier (1988–1990).

In 2003, Mental Images completed an investment round led by ViewPoint Ventures and another large international private equity investor.[1] Since December 2007, Mental Images GmbH has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Nvidia Corporation.[2] The company is headquartered in Berlin with subsidiaries in San Francisco (Mental Images Inc.) and Melbourne (Mental Images Pty. Ltd.) as well as an office in Stockholm. Following its acquisition by Nvidia, the company was renamed Nvidia Advanced Rendering Center (Nvidia ARC GmbH).

## Products

[edit]

Mental Images was the developer of the rendering software mental ray, iray,[3] mental mill, RealityServer, and DiCE. Mental ray is a production-quality render engine that has been used in many feature films, including Hulk, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, The Day After Tomorrow, and much more over three decades.[4][5]

## Filmography

[edit]

* Mental Images[6] (1987) (movie awarded at Prix Ars Electronica 1987, 4 min, demonstrating the technical possibilities of the time)
* Asterix in America (1994) (3D computer animation "Storm Sequence" and digital effects, software development)
* Heaven (2002) (images computed with Mental Ray)

## References

[edit]

1. ^ "Mental Images conjures up funding". CNET. Retrieved 2024-05-01.
2. ^ "mental images®". Archived from the original on 6 Jun 2011.
3. ^ Keller, Alexander; Wächter, Carsten; Raab, Matthias; Seibert, Daniel; van Antwerpen, Dietger; Korndörfer, Johann; Kettner, Lutz (2017). "The iray light transport simulation and rendering system". ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Talks. Los Angeles, California: ACM. pp. 1–2\. arXiv:1705.01263. doi:10.1145/3084363.3085050. ISBN 978-1-4503-5008-2.
4. ^ "The Great History of Mental ray: 1990-2018". inspirationtuts. 28 June 2020. Retrieved 2025-04-08.
5. ^ "What Happened to Mental ray — Mental ray history“ on YouTube
6. ^ "MENTAL IMAGES“ on YouTube

## External links

[edit]

* Official website
* Prix Ars Electronica 1987, Award of Distinction for the film "Mental Images", 1987
* Technical Oscars: The 75th Scientific & Technical Awards 2002 / 2003
* mental images office at the Kant Dreieck tower
* Los Angeles mental ray User Group, archived from the original on 2002-11-22

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Nvidia

GeForce (List of GPUs)

| Fixed pixel pipeline|

| Pre-GeForce|

* NV1
* NV2

* RIVA 128
* RIVA TNT
* TNT2

|

*  GeForce 256
* 2
* 4 MX

Vertex and pixel shaders|

* GeForce 3
* 4 Ti
* FX
* 6
* 7

Unified shaders|

* GeForce 8
* 9
* 100
* 200
* 300
* 400
* 500

Unified shaders & NUMA|

* GeForce 600
* 700
* 800M
* 900
* 10
* 16

Ray tracing & Tensor Cores|

* GeForce 20
* 30
* 40
* 50

Software and technologies

| Multimedia acceleration|

* NVENC (video encoding)
* NVDEC (video decoding)
* PureVideo (video decoding)

|

Software|

* Cg (shading language)
* CUDA
* Nvidia GameWorks
* OptiX (ray tracing API)
* PhysX (physics SDK)
* Nvidia Omniverse (3D graphics)
* Nvidia RTX (ray tracing platform)
* Nvidia System Tools
* VDPAU (video decode API)

Technologies|

* Nvidia 3D Vision (stereo 3D)
* Nvidia G-Sync (variable refresh rate)
* Nvidia Optimus (GPU switching)
* Nvidia Surround (multi-monitor)
* MXM (module/socket)
* SXM (module/socket)
* NVLink (protocol)
* Scalable Link Interface (multi-GPU)
* TurboCache (framebuffer in system memory)
* Video Super Resolution (live video upscaling)

GPU microarchitectures|

* Celsius
* Kelvin
* Rankine
* Curie
* Tesla
* Fermi
* Kepler
* Maxwell
* Pascal
* Volta
* Turing
* Ampere
* Hopper
* Ada Lovelace
* Blackwell
* Rubin
* Feynman

Other products

| Graphics Workstation cards|

* Nvidia Quadro
* Quadro Plex

|

GPGPU|

* Nvidia Tesla
* DGX

Console components|

* NV2A (Xbox)
* RSX 'Reality Synthesizer' (PlayStation 3)
* Tegra NX-SoC (Nintendo Switch)

Nvidia Shield|

* Shield Portable
* Shield Tablet
* Shield Android TV
* GeForce Now

SoCs and embedded|

* GoForce
* Drive
* Jetson
* Tegra

CPUs|

* Project Denver

Computer chipsets|

* nForce

Company

| Key people|

* Jen-Hsun Huang
* Chris Malachowsky
* Curtis Priem
* David Kirk
* Bill Dally
* Debora Shoquist
* Ranga Jayaraman
* Jonah M. Alben

|

Acquisitions|

* 3dfx Interactive
* Ageia
* ULi
* Bright Computing
* Cumulus Networks
* DeepMap
* Icera
* Mellanox Technologies
* Mental Images
* PortalPlayer
* Exluna
* MediaQ
* Stexar

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