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 CPU Rendering

OSPRay features scalable CPU 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. OSPRay is part of the Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit 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 is completely CPU-based, and runs on anything from laptops, to workstations, to compute nodes in HPC systems.

OSPRay internally builds on top of Intel Embree and ISPC (Intel SPMD Program Compiler), and fully exploits modern instruction sets like Intel SSE4, AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512 to achieve high rendering performance, thus a CPU with support for at least SSE4.1 is required to run OSPRay.

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. Should you find any such issues please report them immediately via OSPRay’s GitHub Issue Tracker (or, if you should happen to have a fix for it,you can also send us a pull request); for missing features please contact us via email at ospray@googlegroups.com.

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

New in Version 2.1.1

CarPaint obeys coat weight parameter
Correct depth buffer values with SciVis renderer
Adaptions to Embree v3.10.0
The Linux binary release finds ospcommon again

New in Version 2.1.0

New clipping geometries feature that allows clipping any scene (geometry and volumes); all OSPRay geometry types can by used as clipping geometry
- Inverted clipping is supported via new invertNormals parameter of GeometricModel
- Currently there is a fixed upper limit (64) of how many clipping geometries can be nested
- When clipping with curves geometry (any basis except linear) some rendering artifacts may appear
New plane geometry defined via plane equation and optional bounding box
Sun-sky light based on physical model of Hošek-Wilkie
Support for photometric lights (e.g., IES or EULUMDAT)
Add new ospGetTaskDuration API call to query execution time of asynchronous tasks
Support for 16bit (unsigned short) textures
Add static cpp::Device::current method as a C++ wrapper equivalent to ospGetCurrentDevice
Generalized cpp::Device parameter setting to match other handle types
Passing NULL to ospRelease is not reported as error anymore
Fix computation of strides for OSPData
Fix transparency in scivis renderer
Add missing C++ wrapper for ospGetVariance
Proper demonstration of ospGetVariance in ospTutorialAsync
Fix handling of --osp:device-params to process and set all passed arguments first before committing the device, to ensure it is committed in a valid state.
Object factory functions are now registered during module initialization via the appropriate registerType function
Fix issue with OSPRay ignoring tasking system thread count settings
Fix issue where OSPRay always loaded the ISPC module, even if not required
OSPRay now requires minimum Open VKL v0.9.0

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