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 v2.7.1:

Use Open VKL v1.0.1 to fix sporadic slowdowns when rendering structured regular and VDB volumes with the SciVis renderer
Fix CMake variables and logic
Fix crash when transferfunction.opacity = 0
Fix bug in MPI data-parallel rendering that caused rendering to hang
Workaround dynamic linking issue on Windows in MPI distributed rendering
Correctly initialize renderFrame progress
Improved performance of data-parallel rendering for scenes with a large number of regions
Expanded camera model support of the data-parallel renderer, data-parallel rendering can now use all the camera models supported by the scivis renderer
Clarify documentation and error messages

Changes in v2.7.0:

Add support for transformation and camera Motion Blur (with the path tracer) via shutter parameter of the camera and motion.transform array and time parameter of the instance and camera
OSPRay can now be built for ARM64 CPUs with NEON (e.g., Apple M1) using the superbuild. Thus, new minimum versions are for ISPC 1.16.0, for Embree 3.13.1 and for rkcommon 1.7.0
OSPRay now requires minimum Open VKL v1.0.0 to bring the following improvements:
- Configurable background values for all volume types (default NaN), defining region outside the volume domain
- Better default sampling rate for scaled VDB volumes, improved robustness
- Structured regular volumes now support tricubic filtering and more accurate gradient computations as well as more robust isosurfaces
The multidevice module contains a new OSPRay device implementation that delegates work to any number of subdevices. This is an experimental feature in this release but we invite feedback
SciVis Renderer now ignores normal/albedo/depth hits on surfaces that are fully transmissive (material d = 0)
Changed the behavior of background rendering in SciVis renderer to more closely reflect that of the path tracer: Background hits are rendered in background color in the albedo buffer and black in the normal buffer
The SciVis renderer does not compute depth of field (DoF) anymore, as this effect does not align with the SciVis renderer definition and exposed artifacts
Fixed crash on exit when using the MPI device
Fixed rendering of depth buffer in the example application
The first argument to material constructor ospNewMaterial, i.e., renderer_type, is now deprecated and will be removed in a future release. AO and SciVis renderers still assume “obj” like behavior for all material types
Deprecated the xfm parameter of the instance, use transform instead
Dependencies Google Benchmark, GoggleTest, and Snappy moved out-of-source to superbuild ExternalProjects

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