Computer reality pioneers, ART VPS, will be showing the latest enhancements to their powerful PURE and RenderDrive 3D rendering solutions at Siggraph 2003, the 30th international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, taking place in San Diego, CA 27-31 July. ART VPS develop leading-edge hardware and software that radically improves the quality of images generated by computers – and has the potential to dramatically change the way that manufacturing and design companies collaborate and communicate on new product designs.

The technology developed by ART VPS simulates the complex physics of the real world to create an image from a 3D CAD model. The results are undistinguishable from a photograph. Uniquely, ART VPS have implemented their physically based rendering within specialised hardware enabling images to be generated many times faster than with conventional software rendering.

With PURE and RenderDrive, designers can employ and combine all the rendering features that are traditionally expensive and time-consuming to calculate - such as multiple area lights, accurate motion blur and depth of field, secondary illumination, and physically based materials, lighting and camera properties. With complex data, PURE can deliver a rendering speed increase of 15X over software rendering, whilst RenderDrive RD5000 can deliver a rendering speed increase of 35X over software rendering – reducing the time required to render a single high-resolution image from 12 hours to just 21 minutes.

PURE puts ART VPS's innovative rendering technology inside a graphics workstation. A powerful, compact and affordable PCI 3D rendering card, PURE is a highly productive high quality 3D rendering solution. With PURE, there's no megabuck render farm to buy or rent to render 3D work as PURE is on-board the workstation. And there is certainly no trade-off - on this one PCI card, eight of ART VPS dedicated ray tracing processors render design work faster, better and more affordably than any other rendering solution.

RenderDrive is ART VPS’s family of high-end 3D rendering appliances – dedicated rendering servers specifically designed to tackle the most intensive of rendering jobs. RenderDrive offers maximum ray tracing performance, the largest scene data capacity, and is a shared network device to offer maximum resource utilization. For applications handling large and complex models such as aerospace and automotive design or large architectural development, or applications requiring minimum rendering latency, ART VPS's RenderDrive appliances offer the highest rendering performance and the most reliable and robust platform.

All systems from ART VPS are delivered with site-wide licenses for the RenderPipe plug-in interfaces for popular 3D software applications 3dsmax, VIZ, and Maya – enabling all designers in a studio to share the rendering resources at no additional cost.

Delivering the highest quality images at fast production speeds has led to the adoption of ART VPS solutions by some of the world’s biggest design and manufacturing companies including Bombardier Aerospace, Nikon Corporation and Procter & Gamble for industrial design; and HDR Inc, Sheppard Robson Architects, and Skidmore Owings & Merrill for architectural visualization.

ART VPS will be showing PURE and RenderDrive on Booth #1629, with its partner The 3D Shop.