At the huge Siggraph 2009 computer graphics show in New Orleans this week software giant Autodesk has announced a series of new Autodesk 2010 branded products. Among them is the new standalone version of Autodesk mental ray renderer.
mental ray 7.5.x for Maya 2010
mental ray 7.5.x Standalone 3D rendering software is a high-performance ray-tracing engine for producing photo-realistic imagery. The new standalone version is supported on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms and will run as the rendering engine option within various Autodesk 2010 products.
For Mac users this will be limited to Autodesk Maya 2010 for Mac. mental ray standalone will also be available for Autodesk 3ds Max 2010, Autodesk Softimage 7.5 and Autodesk Softimage 2010.
This Autodesk web page gives an overview of the new standalone mental ray option.