The chipmaker nVidia has bought the German producer of Mental Ray – Mental Images.
This may influence future functionalilty of Inventor and AutoCAD (in a positive way) as Mental Ray is the rendering engine in almost all Autodesk software. You can expect that nVidia will try to support some Mental Ray functions directly on hardware and move some of the rendering tasks to the GPU. And all Mental Ray based CAD and visualization software will benefit from this – but of course only if you have an nVidia graphics card in your CAD workstation.
[...] Via A good reason to have nVidia card in CAD workstation [...]