mental images’s 3D visualization technologies to be integrated into RTT’s software for product design and marketing professionals

BERLIN and Munich; March 31, 2010: Realtime Technology AG (RTT), a leader in realtime 3D visualization software and services for product design and marketing, and mental images, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDIA Corp. and the global leader in rendering and other component and platform software for visualization and 3D cloud computing, today announced a technology licensing agreement. Under the agreement, RTT will integrate mental images’s iray® and neuray® rendering and other RealityServer® platform component technologies such as the DiCE™ middleware into its software products RTT PowerHouse® and RTT DeltaGen®. RTT may also incorporate mental images technologies in other future software products.

RTT’s products and services are used by many of the world’s leading automotive and aerospace companies, and more recently also white goods, apparel and other consumer brands, to instantly produce photorealistic images and interact with 3D models of products at all stages of their lifecycle, while consumers use RTT’s visual product configurators in the buying process.

Users of RTT’s top-of-the-line 3D visualization tools will benefit from significant enhancements of speed, quality and overall workflow resulting in a major increase in productivity. In addition, new web services will become possible that integrate existing workflows with the power of server-based 3D visualization in the Cloud.

RTT plans to announce the availability of the new product versions at its annual worldwide customer conference which will take place on May 6-7, 2010 in Munich, Germany.

“We are pleased that RTT has selected mental images’s rendering and platform component technologies for integration in their leading software products,” says Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. “Both mental images and RTT are known for their dedication to the advancement of design visualization and 3D content platform solutions. With the integration of mental images’s component and platform technologies, RTT’s products will feature the most sophisticated rendering technology for the fast and accurate visual representation of physical objects and phenomena using the immense processing power of GPUs. This will significantly improve visual quality and performance, resulting in more fluid workflows and faster turnaround times for users.”

“The integration of iray into our products is a logical continuation of our strategy. mental images’s state-of-the-art approach and the alignment of iray with our strategic hardware and middleware platforms fit perfectly with our high quality and performance standards here at RTT,” says Ludwig A. Fuchs, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of RTT AG. “Whether our clients are designing the aerodynamic body of a high-end sports car or promoting a special-edition jogging shoe, they will have the benefit of better image quality and faster workflows. We look forward to harnessing the power of CUDA GPUs for highest-quality results that will be generated faster than ever before.”

mental images Products

The following mental images products and technologies are accessible to RTT under the agreement:

RealityServer is the scalable software platform that allows companies to easily develop and deploy multi-user collaborative 3D web application services for visualizing even the largest 3D scenes on secure servers and Cloud computing facilities.

neuray is the RealityServer platform component that contains a variety of rendering technologies, including iray.

iray is an intuitive-to-operate, interactive, consistent, high-performance global illumination rendering technology that generates photorealistic imagery by simulating the physical behavior of light. Unlike other ray-tracing renderers, iray does not depend on complex renderer specific shaders and settings to approximate global illumination. iray achieves its high level of performance by taking full advantage of the CUDA™ architecture programming model, allowing interactive previewing on a single NVIDIA GPU, and scaling well on NVIDIA® multi-GPU platforms.

DiCE is a platform and middleware for the development of parallelized high performance computing applications. It helps software developers to develop applications which efficiently scale to thousands of multi-core CPUs and GPUs, both in single computers and across multiple systems.


Press Contacts

mental images:
Nicole Arena
Double Forte Marketing + Communications
e-mail: Email Contact
Telephone: +1 (415) 848.8103

-Or-

Loretta Stevens
Double Forte Marketing + Communications
e-mail: Email Contact
Telephone: +1 (415) 848.8123

RTT:
Anatol Vetters
Weber Shandwick
e-mail: Email Contact
Telephone: +49 (0) 89 380179-38

 
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 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 RTT

RTT provides 3D real-time visualisation technology and services for innovative workflows in the automotive, aerospace and consumer goods industries as well as in the fields of interior design and architecture. It supports customers in coming up with new ways of how to design and to market their products.

Among RTT’s customers are Adidas, Audi, BASF, BMW, Bosch, Daimler, EADS, Harley-Davidson, Miele, Porsche, Samsung, Thyssen Krupp, Toyota and Volkswagen.

The supplier of 3D real-time visualisation solutions looks back on a remarkable development with average annual growth rates of 50 per cent over the past few years. RTT currently employs about 400 people at 14 locations. The company is based in Munich. Further offices are located in Los Angeles, Detroit, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, Brussels, Milan, Valencia, Melbourne, Singapore, Stuttgart and Hamburg.

RTT is a public company traded on Open-Market Frankfurt, Xetra, Freiverkehr Stuttgart and Freiverkehr Berlin-Bremen: R1T, ISIN: DE0007012205. For more information see www.rtt.ag.


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.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits, features, and capabilities of the mental ray, iray, RealityServer and DiCE software technologies as well as the NVIDIA CUDA architecture are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development of more efficient or faster technology; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2010. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA and mental images disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.