The Open, Scalable, and Portable Ray Tracing Engine

Render massive scenes interactively

Disney’s Moana Island Scene: over 15 billion instanced primitives+volume at interactive rates

Photorealism

Physically-based shading and lighting

Feature rich, large-scale volume visualization

Richtmyer–meshkov volume shown with shadows and ambient occlusion

USD Hydra Integration

Gramophone rendered in Pixar’s usdview

Integrations in VTK, ParaView, VisIt, and more

DKRZ weather data rendered with shadows inside ParaView

Directly render unstructured and AMR volumes

AMR volume rendered without resampling inside ParaView

Interactive Rendering on CPU or GPU

OSPRay features scalable CPU and GPU rendering capabilities geared toward Scientific Visualization applications. Advanced shading effects such as ambient occlusion, shadows, and transparency can be rendered interactively to enable new insights into huge data.

Global Illumination

OSPRay includes a path tracer capable of interactively rendering photorealistic global illumination with phyiscally-based materials.

Volume Rendering

OSPRay supports high-fidelity, interactive direct volume rendering with a number of state of the art visualization features.

MPI Distributed

Run on large scale distributed-memory systems with high-performance MPI backends to both decrease render time and increase total scene size.

Industry Adoption

OSPRay is directly integrated into ParaView 5.x. Implementations for VisIt, VMD, and other popular tools have also freely available.

Open Source

OSPRay is Open Sourced under the Apache 2.0 license.

OSPRay Overview

Intel® OSPRay is an open source, scalable, and portable ray tracing engine for high-performance, high-fidelity visualization on Intel Architecture CPUs, Intel Xe GPUs, and Aarch64/ARM64 CPUs. OSPRay is part of the Intel Rendering Toolkit (Render Kit) and is released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.

The purpose of OSPRay is to provide an open, powerful, and easy-to-use rendering library that allows one to easily build applications that use ray tracing based rendering for interactive applications (including both surface- and volume-based visualizations). OSPRay runs on anything from laptops, to workstations, to compute nodes in HPC systems.

OSPRay internally builds on top of Intel Embree, Intel Open VKL, and Intel Open Image Denoise. The CPU implementation is based on Intel ISPC (Implicit SPMD Program Compiler) and fully exploits modern instruction sets like Intel SSE4, AVX, AVX2, AVX-512 and NEON to achieve high rendering performance. Hence, a CPU with support for at least SSE4.1 is required to run OSPRay on x86_64 architectures, or a CPU with support for NEON is required to run OSPRay on ARM64 architectures.

OSPRay’s GPU implementation (beta status) is based on the SYCL cross-platform programming language implemented by Intel oneAPI Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) and currently supports Intel Arc™ GPUs on Linux and Windows, and Intel Data Center GPU Flex and Max Series on Linux, exploiting ray tracing hardware support.

OSPRay Support and Contact

OSPRay is under active development, and though we do our best to guarantee stable release versions a certain number of bugs, as-yet-missing features, inconsistencies, or any other issues are still possible. For any such requests or findings please use OSPRay’s GitHub Issue Tracker (or, if you should happen to have a fix for it, you can also send us a pull request).

To receive release announcements simply “Watch” the OSPRay repository on GitHub.

Changes in v3.2.0:

Sampling improvements:
- Better performance (lower rendering time and faster convergence)
- More pleasing blue noise enabled when the total number of frames to be accumulated is known in advance and set as the targetFrames parameter at the framebuffer
- Note a maximum of 64k samples is supported
Improved denoiser image operation:
- User-controlled quality levels via parameter quality
- Optionally denoise alpha channel as well, enabled via parameter denoiseAlpha
Support half-precision (16 bit float) texture formats OSP_TEXTURE_[RGBA16F|RGB16F|RA16F|R16F] and two-channel 32 bit float textures OSP_TEXTURE_RA32F
New parameter limitIndirectLightSamples for the pathtracer which limits the number of light samples after the first non-specular (i.e., diffuse and glossy) bounce to at most one
Implement MIP Mapping for better texture filtering. If the additional memory per texture needed cannot be spared, applications can disable the generation of MIP maps with device parameter disableMipMapGeneration
The backplate (background texture) is now always sampled at the pixel center and thus not blurred by the pixel filter anymore
Avoid color bleeding across eye-subimages when stereo rendering
Superbuild uses binary packages of Open VKL
Removed Intel ISPCRT dependency (ISPC compiler is still needed):
- oneAPI Level Zero Loader is no longer necessary
- zeContext and zeDevicedevice parameters are no longer supported
- ispcrtContext and ispcrtDevicedevice parameters are no longer supported
Clarify the size of OSP_BOOL to be 1 byte
Fix artifacts occasionally appearing with gpu device
The new minimum versions of dependencies:
- Embree v4.3.3 (better error reporting)
- Open Image Denoise v2.3 (better image quality with HIGH quality mode, added FAST quality mode)
- rkcommon v1.14.0

Changes in v3.1.0:

Principled and Luminous materials support emissive textures
Add native support for disc and oriented disc geometry
Add support for mirror repeat and clamp to edge texture wrap modes
GPU device now also supports motion blur
Improve noise in reflections of ThinGlass
Improve adaptive accumulation: working with GPU, fix correlations
Fix indirectly seen albedo and normal buffer
Fix artifacts when using specular texture for Principled
Fixes for PixelFilter
- Parameter was ignored (always using the default Gaussian)
- Avoid a shift/misalignment within the pixel for first sample
Fix empty image on Windows when focusDistance=0
Fix missing SDK headers for ISPCDevice*
The new minimum versions of dependencies:
- Embree v4.3.1
- Open VKL v2.0.1
- Open Image Denoise v2.2 (better quality with fine details, support AArch64 CPU on Linux)
- ISPCRT v1.23.0 (uses environment variable ISPCRT_GPU_DRIVER to select GPU to run on when multiple (i)GPUs are present)
- rkcommon v1.13.0 (fixes crash using GPU and emissive geometry)

For the complete history of changes have a look at the CHANGELOG.