End Of An Era: NVIDIA Ceases Mental Ray Development To Focus On More Advanced Solutions

The rendering world is soon to witness the end of an era, as NVIDIA has announced that it’s going to cease development of the mainstay renderer, Mental Ray. Based on a couple of conversations I’ve had with NVIDIA over the past couple of months, this news isn’t too surprising (it also helps that Mental Ray didn’t ship by default with 3ds Max 2017 and 2018). It’s not necessarily a bad thing, either (though that will depend on whether or not you heavily rely-upon it), but it’s definitely notable.

Mental Ray’s original developer, Mental Images, was born in 1986, and birthed the software’s first release in 1989. By the time 1999 rolled around, Mental Ray found support in both Softimage|XSI and 3ds Max – the latter of which was versioned R3 at the time (and then stylized “3D Studio MAX”). In 2003, the release of “Discreet 3dsmax 6” (there is so much history here, it’s crazy) bundled Mental Ray as an alternative renderer, where it remained a constant until the release of the 2017 version.

In 2007, NVIDIA’s keen interest in GPU compute became very apparent when it released its CUDA API. That interest in compute was bolstered months later, in December, when the company acquired all of Mental Images. Since that time, Mental Ray has remained well-supported in the industry, and in particular, with Autodesk’s super-popular 3ds Max and Maya design suites.

NVIDIA will no longer be selling Mental Ray plugin products in order to focus on bringing AI and further GPU acceleration to graphics by developing SDKs and technologies for software development partners. Learn More: https://t.co/cgoEPeeFI6

— mental ray (@mentalray) November 20, 2017

10 years is a long time, especially when we’re talking about technology. In recent years, NVIDIA has developed other technologies that are technically superior, and make full use of the GPU to speed rendering jobs up (and use less power in the end). Its OptiX ray tracing engine is at the heart of Iray, which today acts as the default renderer in CATIA and Siemens NX. It also powers the ray tracing capabilities in Adobe’s After Effects, as well as Pixar’s in-house design suite, Flow.

Loading a Mental Ray project with no plugin in 3ds Max 2018

Earlier this year, NVIDIA announced that it was making OptiX free for commercial use, royalty-free. With that move, it’s easier to understand why NVIDIA wants to unload Mental Ray and focus entirely on other technologies, such as OptiX and everything else related to compute and rendering.

Those still using Mental Ray can peruse this official PDF to better figure out what to do next. The key thing to note is that NVIDIA remains committed to releasing bug fix releases through 2018.

That all said, this is still a bit of a sad sending off, given just how popular Mental Ray had become over the years. But, as one of the earliest in the industry, Mental Ray’s goods have long been emulated (and improved-upon) in other, more modern renderers, so this move seemed inevitable.