iRay demos

Previously, I’d mentioned that mental images had released iRay in the latest release of the mental ray rendering engine.  iRay is a GPU based rendering system rather than a CPU based rendering system, shifting the rendering tasks from the multi-purpose main processor of your computer to the very narrowly focused graphics processor on board your video card.  The GPU is an extremely fast processor that is purpose built to handle images and it has a much wider pipe than your CPU since it does not need to handle a multitude of commands.  The result is potentially far faster processing of rendered images.  Of course, it needs to be noted that iRay was written to utilize only the nVidia GPUs but that is what most professionals are using so that shouldn’t be much of an issue.

The interesting part is that mental images and CGArchitect.com have teamed up to produce several videos detailing the abilities of iRay and for a first go around, these are nothing short of outstanding.  Take a look and for yourself and imagine the impact that this technology will have on the world of visualization in the very near future.  You can view the videos at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5WyOQe4AHc

Stephen Gabriel