Nvidia has scrapped out its budget to acquire the German company Mental Images. The latter company has been founded in 1986 and is one of the most important providers of visualization software for the entertainment, computer-aided design, scientific visualization, architecture, and other industries that require sophisticated images.

Their most important product is the Mental Ray rendering software that runs on multiple configurations and platforms, including workstation networks or parallel supercomputers. The software can deliver photorealistic images and is mostly used in the movie industry. Mental Ray is also integrated in professional rendering software such as Autodesk's AutoCAD, Autodesk 3ds MaxAutodesk Maya, Dassault Systems CATIA and Solidworks, and AVID Softimage XSI.

Mental has a strong presence in the film industry, and creates visual effects for well-known studios and companies, such as Buf Compagnie, Digital Domain, DreamWorks Animation, Lucasfilm, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Rainmaker, The Mill, The Moving Picture Company and The Orphanage.

The acquisition leaves room to extended speculations about how Nvidia will exploit this new asset. Rumor has it that Nvidia will take advantage of the award-winner Mental Ray software to create extended graphics tools to be used in the next generation of games. This is likely to happen, since the gaming industry's cornerstone, Havok, has been purchased by Intel and AGEIA is still in larva stage.

Another bold supposition would be that Nvidia is going to use the Mental heavy artillery as a sales catapult for their own products. Given the fact that Mental is working with studios as Lucasfilm, Sony Pictures and Dreamworks, what if they optimized the software for their video cards? They could sell entire animation systems, built with their own video cards and equipped with the latest generation of processors, directly to the above-mentioned animation houses.

It's just a supposition, but how would you like to see the next Star-Wars episode bearing Nvidia's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" slogan?