Chaos Software announces the official release of V-Ray RT for 3dsMax. The first interactive renderer of this kind for 3dsMax will be available for immediate purchase on June 1st, 2009. Created with the busy and rigorous 3D artist in mind, this topnotch raytracing technology allows immediate interaction between the user and the virtual environment.  V-Ray RT follows the user’s actions while working on the scene and automatically and progressively generates a photorealistic preview of the scene. Designed to improve and fasten the artist’s work on the Texturing and Lightening stage V-Ray RT fully supports: Interactivity, Animation, Illumination, Global Illumination, Shading effects, Texturing, Camera effects, Color mapping, and Distributed rendering.

On June 1st 2009 V-Ray RT will be on the market through our resellers’ network around the world. The official suggested end user price: 

European Union: EUR499
World-wide: USD599

For a limited time only, during the V-Ray RT promotion stage, all users will be able to experience the speed and interactivity of our new product on the special price of:

European Union: EUR249
World-wide: USD299

In order to explore the rendering opportunities of V-Ray RT you must have installed V-Ray 1.50.SP3 or a later version. We were concerned that you may need the latest and greatest graphics card to make use of this technology but according to the website this is not so. It seems that it is entirely CPU based. From the website:

"Currently it is CPU-based. Does NOT require special graphics cards Currently the V-Ray RT technology is based on CPUs - it does NOT require any special or expensive graphics cards. All V-Ray RT needs is CPUs. As usual - we will use ALL of your CPUs and cores at no extra license cost. However, the V-Ray RT architecture is very robust and if needed - it can seamlessly be implemented to allow new hardware acceleration technologies in the future..."

Licensing
In order to take advantage of the rendering capabilities of V-Ray RT, the user must have a working installation of V-Ray 1.50.SP3 or later. The existing V-Ray dongle can be reprogrammed to contain the extra V-Ray RT licenses, or a separate dongle for V-Ray RT can be obtained.

Read more on their site
http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/vrayrt.html?ff=ENMMON