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 v2.11.0:

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 and MPI_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 the mpi_offload module, while the mpiDistributed device is now in the mpi_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” when dynamicScene 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 by OSPRAY_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
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 the piecewiseLinear transfer function, use box1f value instead

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