mental images announces mental mill^TM
Artist Edition

Revolutionary Shader Creation Tool Developed Specifically for Artists Previewed at GDC 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. and BERLIN, Germany, March 7, 2007 ---  mental images^® 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^® 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 Sébastien Dominé, 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^®, 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^® winning photorealistic rendering software mental ray^® 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^® 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.