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 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 v2.9.0:

Add support for multi-segment deformation motion blur for mesh geometry
OSPRay now requires minimum Open VKL v1.2.0 to bring the following improvements:
- Structured regular volumes support for cell-centered data via the cellCentered parameter (vertex-centered remains the default)
- Particle volumes ignore particles with zero radius
Add support for dynamic load balancing in MPI Offload device
Support for photometric lights (e.g., IES or EULUMDAT) also for sphere and quad lights. When setting intensityDistribution, other values for intensityQuantity than OSP_INTENSITY_QUANTITY_SCALE are deprecated
Changed CMake variables for enabling app categories:
- OSPRAY_ENABLE_APPS_BENCHMARK replaces OSPRAY_APPS_BENCHMARK
- OSPRAY_ENABLE_APPS_EXAMPLES replaces OSPRAY_APPS_EXAMPLES
- OSPRAY_ENABLE_APPS_TUTORIALS replaces OSPRAY_APPS_TUTORIALS
- OSPRAY_ENABLE_APPS_TESTING replaces OSPRAY_APPS_TESTING
Improve sampling of quad lights in the pathtracer (solid angle instead of area)
Instances can now have the group object rebound via a parameter
Fix leaking framebuffers in the MPI Offload device
Resolve possible race condition in assigning IDs to distributed objects in the MPI device
Move ISPC module to modules/ folder and renamed the module to cpu
Minimum version of rkcommon is 1.9.0, which brings the following improvements:
- Add support for Intel oneAPI DPCPP compiler
- Fix memory leak

Changes in v2.8.0:

Lights can be now part of OSPGroup and thus instanced like geometries and volumes and thus lights also support motion blur (with the path tracer)
Add cylinder light (with solid area sampling)
Add support for rolling shutter of cameras
Add support for quaternion motion blur for instance and camera to allow for smoothly interpolated rotations
Fix illumination from emissive quad meshes

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