We just released a major update of the NVIDIA Mental Ray for Maya plugin, introducing support for the upcoming Volta GPU generation from NVIDIA using CUDA 9. If you are a user of this plugin then you should have received a notification from the NVIDIA taskbar tool. You may also download the latest version from our mental ray for Maya website.
We now introduce: Mental Ray for Maya 2018.
This is the first release of the NVIDIA mental ray plugin for Maya 2018, coupled with the matching NVIDIA mental ray Standalone. For release notes and download locations please visit our forum at Now Available: Mental Ray for Maya 2018.
Happy Rendering!
Inside mental ray 
Mentalray New Version 1.2 For Maya 2017 can not read texture which have Chinese name. It Display …ers/CZH/Desktop/Mini-Project Submit/Texture/014-皮革材质.jpg can’t open file for reading (No such file or directory But in Ver1.0 I can render this texture well. Please fix this bug,Thanks.
There was a change in the new version which might have an impact. Can you please try the following workaround?
> from ctypes import *
> rlib = CDLL("libray.dll")
> rlib.mi_set_utf8(0)
See if the problem is gone.
Best, Steffen
My batch render only renders black screens, i don’t know what to do!
While embedded rendering with Mental Ray is free, batch rendering does require a license.