The GPU Technology Conference: NVIDIA's New Focus in a Changing Market

A Focus on : Mental Images iRay

Website: Mental Images: Home


In the professional field of architectural rendering, quality presentations and selling a project to a customer is everything. The problem is that photo-real rendering comes at a heavy price in terms of the resources and the computational power that is needed. In some cases, a single ray traced frame can take hours or even days for a traditional rendering farm to complete.

Now, imagine you are the lead architect presenting daytime renderings of an office space on your laptop and out of the blue the client asks to see what their new offices would look like in different lighting conditions. Before iRay, it would have been literally impossible for additional renderings to be completed in a timely fashion.


What iRay does is leverage GPUs into the rendering process and with a predetermined set of instructions, allows for ray traced scenes within existing scenes in record time. In order to do this, Mental Images used highly optimized BSDF and EDF shading frameworks to accurately represent global illumination effects across numerous surfaces, finishes and textures. This is all accelerated through the CUDA architecture which is able to handle these parallel data sets with efficiency that can’t be matched even by today’s most advanced processors.


The result is a one-touch rendering engine that can simulate everything from daylight to spot and point lights and their effect on a scene in a matter of seconds rather than hours. Mental Images also makes it possible to stream rendering requests and results over the internet. This means someone who is travelling to a client can actually render a scene remotely and immediately generate results to a laptop or even a PDA. All in all, this could usher in a new age for on-the-go professionals who need quick changes to their architectural or design presentations.