ART Commences Shipments of its PURE 3D Rendering Card

For Immediate Release

ART Commences Shipments of its PURE 3D Rendering Card for Maya, 3dsmax, 3D Studio VIZ and RenderMan Users

PURE Delivers The Most Productive, High Quality 3D Rendering Solution Available

Cambridge, UK - November 27th, 2001 - Advanced Rendering Technology (ART) has commenced shipments of its PURE(TM) 3D rendering card. Since it's announcement in October, PURE has been hailed by 3D animators and designers as a major breakthrough in rendering productivity. With tightly integrated plug-in interfaces for Alias|Wavefront(TM)'s Maya(R), Discreet's 3dsmax and Autodesk's 3D Studio VIZ, PURE delivers up to 16-times the speed of traditional software-based ray traced rendering tools.

PURE has already been adopted by product design agencies, architectural visualization departments, and animation companies who wish to benefit from PURE's high quality images and performance workflow advantages.

"PURE creates images so life-like that they are indistinguishable from the finished project," commented Dave Slama, Learjet Completions Center, Bombardier Aerospace Inc.

"PURE helps us more rapidly deliver design concepts to our clients, helping them to reduce their time to market" said Alisdair McPhail, Design Engineer at Opius Ltd, a product design agency in London.

"At Hush Design we focus on quality," said Matt Wynne, Managing Director of the architectural visualization specialists, "PURE helps us communicate that to our clients."

Close integration of PURE with Maya, 3dsmax and VIZ through ART's RenderPipe(R) plug-in interfaces has also been cited by users as a major benefit of PURE over many other rendering tools. PURE does not require a user to manipulate and balance a large number of rendering parameters, in order to trade-off rendering speed against image quality. With PURE, the specialised hardware accelerates the rendering calculations ensuring a consistently high image quality and fast rendering speeds.

"The dramatic performance offered by PURE partners well with Maya's emphasis on creativity and productivity. This is a powerful new option enabling Maya artists to stay ahead of the curve in CGI production," stated Chris Ford, Senior Maya Product Manager at Alias|Wavefront.

PURE is ART's low-cost, small form-factor 3D rendering solution that brings the company's award-winning 3D rendering technology to all visualization and animation professionals in the architectural, industrial design and animation industries. PURE renders images up to 16X faster than software-based ray tracing and can simultaneously deliver higher quality images through its silicon chip accelerated ray tracing architecture. Installed within a windows-compatible graphics workstation, PURE brings the power of a render farm onto a designer's desktop.

ART's PURE PCI card is based on proprietary hardware and software that utilizes physically-accurate rendering methods to produce convincing lighting, realistic textures, and lifelike reflections on a variety of materials. With software-based rendering, generating high quality images requires massive computing resources or long production times. Using ART's unique physically based AR350 rendering chips, PURE is able to deliver photographic images far more productively and more cost effectively than ever before. With eight AR350 chips, the PURE P1800 is capable of performing over 1.1 Billion ray/triangle intersection tests each second.

PURE has a manufacturers recommended price of £2499 / $3699 and is available through ART's value-added reseller network.

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About PURE(TM)
PURE comprises software and PCI card hardware based on the company's proprietary ray traced rendering 3D graphics chips, which automatically perform the geometry and shading operations of the ray tracing algorithm. PURE's unique toolset includes a host of powerful features that allow users to easily integrate convincing effects such as accurate real-world lighting, physically-based materials, motion blur, and depth of field, to create images so lifelike they are referred to as virtual photographs. Application plug-in interfaces to PURE are available for 3dsmax, 3D Studio VIZ, Maya, and the generic RenderMan language. PURE is available for PC's and workstations running Windows NT and Windows 2000.

About Advanced Rendering Technology
Advanced Rendering Technology (ART) develops and markets leading-edge computer graphics products for users in the AEC, entertainment, and CAD markets. The company developed the world's first dedicated ray tracing graphics processors - the only 3D graphics chips that can create images of true realism. RenderDrive, ART's 3D rendering appliance, and PURE, ART's 3D rendering workstation add-in board, are application independent and can be used with many 3D applications including 3ds max, 3D Studio VIZ, Houdini, Maya, and any RenderMan-compatible application. ART's customers include: Paul Steelman Design, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, and Taylor Woodrow plc for architectural visualization; The 3DO Company, Aardman Animation, and Naxos Images for film, video, and interactive production; and Bombardier Aerospace, Getty Images, and Procter & Gamble for design visualization. ART can be found on the Web at www.art-render.com.

For more information:
Craig Wareham, Marketing Manager
Tel: +44 1223 563854
craigw@art-render.com

RenderDrive and RenderPipe are registered trademarks, and AR350, PURE, and RenderCoat are trademarks of Advanced Rendering Technology. Maya is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc. exclusively used by Alias|Wavefront a division of Silicon Graphics Limited. Alias|Wavefront is a trademark of Alias|Wavefront, a division of Silicon Graphics Limited. 3dsmax is a trademark of Autodesk Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.