The Open, Scalable, and Portable Ray Tracing Engine



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 .

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

Changes in v2.11.0:

Changes in v2.10.0:

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