Mental Images was bought in December 2007 by NVIDIA, trying to bring some freshness to the old Mental Ray. In 2003 Mental Images was awarded an Academy Award for their contributions to the mental ray rendering software for motion pictures. It has been used by the industry and professionals for over 28 years (the first release have been built in 1989 by Mental Images), Mental Ray has become a standard for photo realistic rendering across the film, visual effects, and design industries (Hulk, The Matrix Reloaded & Revolutions, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, The Day After Tomorrow and Poseidon are just few examples of products made using Mental Ray). Mental Ray is a feature-rich, programmable, biased ray-tracing render engine. We are going to compare these render engines in various aspects, this is a work in progress review, so I will add more tests in the future. Anyway Mental Ray 2017 puts on the table some very good features at a cheaper price than V-ray. Mental Ray had a very slow development in the last 4-5 years and it didn't get any exciting new feature or update. The battle Mental Ray VS V-Ray started many years ago and it seems that v-ray won in any aspect so far. After the NVIDIA anticipations about the departure of Mental Ray and iray rendering as integrated render engines for Maya and 3SMax, many users started to ask themselves what could be the best render engine to pick for their renders.

Vray benchmark list