mental images Announces mental mill(TM) Artist Edition

mental images(R) announces the upcoming availability of mental
mill(TM) Artist Edition at the Games Developer Conference in San
Francisco. mental images is known for providing artists and visual
effects professionals with leading edge software tools to render their
imagination visible such as mental ray(R) and now mental mill(TM),
which is a breakthrough technology for the creation of hardware
shaders in all popular formats.

The mental mill Artist Edition software enables artists and other
professionals to develop, test and maintain shaders through an
intuitive graphical user interface with real-time visual feedback -
without the need for programming skills. Complex cooperating shader
networks for generating photorealistic effects can also be
encapsulated together into Phenomena(TM) by artists without any
programming knowledge.

Providing creative control to non-technical artists greatly
reduces "look" turnaround time during high-pressure game development
cycles and challenging visual effects and design visualization
projects. It introduces a new level of photorealistic visualization
for many users by eliminating the need for the hand-coding of shaders.
The only way to previously achieve this level of photorealism was to
employ dedicated shader programming experts. In addition to the need
for this technology in the entertainment space, the mental mill Artist
Edition will allow new users, including those in the engineering,
product design or marketing space, to access the full power of NVIDIA
hardware.

Because of the close cooperation between NVIDIA and mental images,
this groundbreaking tool will be made available for free along with FX
Composer 2.

"The mental mill Artist Edition complements our FX Composer 2
technology perfectly" says Sebastien Domine, NVIDIA's Director of
Developer Technology Tools. "We have worked hard to make the
interoperability between these two tools seamless and we look forward
to opening up the creation of hardware shaders to an entirely new
category of non-technical design professionals. We will ship the best
of both worlds...more power for artists and additional optimization
abilities for programmers and shader specialists."

"The industries we serve have an ever-growing need for a high
degree of realism and real-time performance, which today are provided
by NVIDIA's graphics processors" said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of
mental images. "Now we will enable artists and other content creators
to be much more productive for projects ranging from CAD visualization
to the creation of video games and online virtual worlds."

mental mill Artist Edition will be provided by NVIDIA at no cost
with the forthcoming release 2.0 of its FX Composer product.

About mental images: mental images(R), founded in 1986, is the
recognized international leader in providing rendering software to the
entertainment, computer-aided design, scientific visualization,
architecture, and other industries that require sophisticated images.
The company's main product is the Academy Award(R) winning
photorealistic rendering software mental ray(R) which runs on a wide
variety of platforms ranging from networks of workstations to parallel
supercomputers, producing images of unsurpassed realism. mental ray
was initially released in 1989 and has been used in the production of
several hundred major motion pictures. Leading visual effects
companies and studios, such as Buf Compagnie, Digital Domain,
DreamWorks Animation, Lucasfilm Animation, Industrial Light and Magic,
The Mill, The Moving Picture Company, The Orphanage, ReelFX, and SONY
Pictures Imageworks are among mental images's largest customers.
Additionally, in the CAD field mental ray is used by the world's
leading automobile and aircraft manufactures to accelerate the design
of new products. - mental images's new product RealityServer(R)
enables interactive manipulation and visualization of existing and
newly created 3D content. Applications based on it permit thousands of
users to simultaneously and optionally collaboratively access and
interact with original 3D data. Since the original content remains on
the server, access to data and user policies are easily secured and
managed centrally.

mental images GmbH is a privately held company based in Berlin,
Germany, with a wholly owned subsidiary mental images, Inc. in San
Francisco, California and an office in Stockholm, Sweden. For more
information, visit www.mentalimages.com.

About NVIDIA: NVIDIA Corporation is the worldwide leader in
programmable graphics processor technologies. The Company creates
innovative, industry-changing products for computing, consumer
electronics, and mobile devices. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa
Clara, CA and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
For more information, visit www.nvidia.com.

Trademarks: mental images(R), mental mill(TM) mental ray(R), and
RealityServer(R) are trademarks or registered trademarks of mental
images GmbH, Berlin, Germany. Other product and company names in this
document may be trademarks of their respective owners.