Hybrid Graphics Ltd., often "Hybrid", was a graphics software technology company active from 1994 to 2007 in Helsinki

Helsinki

Helsinki is the capital and largest city in Finland. It is in the region of Uusimaa, located in southern Finland, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, an arm of the Baltic Sea. The population of the city of Helsinki is , making it by far the most populous municipality in Finland. Helsinki is...

, Finland

Finland

Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

. Acquired by NVIDIA

NVIDIA

Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...

 in 2006, Hybrid Graphics is now NVIDIA Corporation's Helsinki office.

Company history

Until the year 2000, Hybrid was widely known for its middleware solutions for computer games. Hybrid's other business sector was image-making using 3D graphics, this operation was spun off in 2004 as Fake Graphics Ltd. The company's most important product of that time was the OpenGL

OpenGL

OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...

 based graphics library SurRender 3D (1996–2000). In 2000 Hybrid launched the dPVS

DPVS

dPVS by Umbra Software is an advanced computer graphics visibility optimization tool. Designed for developing games with large and dynamic [3D] worlds, dPVS computes visibility databases in real time...

 (dynamic Potentially Visible Set) visibility optimization middleware that is used in many MMORPG

MMORPG

Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....

s, including Star Wars Galaxies

Star Wars Galaxies

Star Wars Galaxies is a Star Wars themed MMORPG for Microsoft Windows developed by Sony Online Entertainment and published by LucasArts.-History:...

 and EverQuest II

EverQuest II

EverQuest II is a 3D fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed by Sony Online Entertainment , based on EverQuest, and shipped on 8 November 2004...

. In 2006 the dPVS technology was acquired by Umbra Software Ltd.

Umbra software

Umbra Software Ltd. is a graphics software technology company founded 2007 in Helsinki, Finland. Umbra Software specializes in occlusion culling, visibility and rendering optimization technology and provides middleware for videogames running on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, PC, iOS and...

.

Hybrid Graphics provided the first commercial implementations of the OpenGL ES

OpenGL ES

OpenGL for Embedded Systems is a subset of the OpenGL 3D graphics application programming interface designed for embedded systems such as mobile phones, PDAs, and video game consoles. OpenGL ES is managed by the not-for-profit technology consortium, the Khronos Group, Inc.- Versions :Several...

 and OpenVG

OpenVG

OpenVG is a standard API designed for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics. It is aimed primarily at mobile phones, media and gaming consoles such as the PlayStation 3, and other consumer electronic devices. It will help manufacturers create flashier user interfaces that are less dependent on...

 mobile graphics APIs, and was actively involved in the development of the M3G

Mobile 3D Graphics API

The Mobile 3D Graphics API, commonly referred to as M3G, is a specification defining an API for writing Java programs that produce 3D computer graphics. It extends the capabilities of the Java ME, a version of the Java platform tailored for embedded devices such as mobile phones and PDAs...

 (JSR-184) Java standard, in the context of the Khronos Group

Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is a not-for-profit member-funded industry consortium based in Beaverton, Oregon, focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free APIs to enable the authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices...

 and Java Community Process

Java Community Process

The Java Community Process or JCP, established in 1998, is a formalized process that allows interested parties to get involved in the definition of future versions and features of the Java platform....

, respectively. Hybrid also sponsored academic research on computer graphics, including multiple papers published in SIGGRAPH

SIGGRAPH

SIGGRAPH is the name of the annual conference on computer graphics convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. The first SIGGRAPH conference was in 1974. The conference is attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals...

.