The Open, Scalable, and Portable Ray Tracing Engine
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 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, thus a CPU with support for at least SSE4.1 is required to run OSPRay on x86_64 architectures. A CPU with support for NEON is required to run OSPRay on ARM64 architectures.
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.
Changes in v2.11.0:
- Support single ISPC target on Windows
- OSPRay’s superbuild can now be provided a CMake toolchain file for cross-compilation
- Add support for double pumped NEON instruction on ARM64
- Reduce the memory overhead of the
mpiOffload
device and resolve memory andMPI_Comm
handle leaks - Support for volume rendering (and thus the dependency to Open VKL)
can now be compile-time controlled via CMake variable
OSPRAY_ENABLE_VOLUMES
- OSPRay’s MPI modules have been split up and renamed, the
mpiOffload
device is now in thempi_offload
module, while thempiDistributed
device is now in thempi_distributed_cpu
module - Add native support for spheres via Embree, which requires the positions and radius of the spheres to be interleaved in memory; if this is not the case, OSPRay will internally create a copy of the data
- Fix
dynamicScene
flag on World and Group to influence BVH quality again: default is now “high”, which should improve rendering performance, depending on the scene; and “low” whendynamicScene
is enabled (improving BVH build performance) - Fix a crash in
pathtracer
when there are no lights - Fix a data corruption bug when setting string parameters for objects
in the
mpiOffload
device - Various documentation fixes
- OSPRay now has a new dependency, which is ISPC Run Time (ISPCRT) in minimum 1.19.0 version
- Adapt to Embree v4.0.0 API changes, which is thus the new minimum version; additionally, the new minimum version for Open VKL is v1.3.2 and for ISPC v1.19.0
- Removed support of MSVC14.0 (Visual Studio 2015) and the second generation Intel Xeon Phi processor (codename Knights Landing)
Changes in v2.10.0:
- Add support for primitive, object, and instance ID buffers as framebuffer channels
- Support face-varying attributes for Mesh and Subdivision geometry
- Replace CMake variable
OSPRAY_PIXELS_PER_JOB
byOSPRAY_RENDER_TASK_SIZE
; variance tracking for adaptive accumulation is now per task instead of per tile, allowing for more granular adaptation - OSPRay now requires minimum Open VKL v1.3.0 to bring the following
improvements:
- VDB volumes added support for contiguous data layouts, which can
provide improved performance (
nodesPackedDense
,nodesPackedTile
parameters) - Particle volumes are more memory efficiency and improved performance
- VDB volumes added support for contiguous data layouts, which can
provide improved performance (
- OSPRay now requires minimum ISPC v1.18.0 for Open VKL and to include a fix for parallel dispatch of uniform function pointers
- MPI Offload: resolve object life time tracking issue that would result in framebuffer and data info being release too early, leading to a crash
- Fix crash with OpenMPI due to argument handling
- Fix clipping when rays are parallel to clipping planes
- Fix missing SDK headers from CPU and MPI module
- Deprecated the
vec2f valueRange
parameter of thepiecewiseLinear
transfer function, usebox1f value
instead
For the complete history of changes have a look at the CHANGELOG.