Intel has released the OSPRay 2.0 distributed ray tracing engine

Intel Corporation introduced significant release of a scalable 3D rendering engine OSPRay 2.0, designed for realistic, high-quality visualization using ray tracing, suitable for use in interactive applications. The engine is developed as part of a larger project Intel Rendering Framework, aimed at developing software visualization tools for scientific computations SDVis (Software Defined Visualization), which includes a ray tracing library Embree, a photorealistic rendering system GLuRay, a library for image denoising oidn (Open Image Denoise) and a software rasterization system OpenSWR. The code is written in C++ and has been published under the Apache 2.0 license.

OSPRay is primarily aimed at use in interactive applications for real-time scene rendering. To simulate light behavior, the method of path tracingis employed. Volume and planar visualization is supported, with photorealistic global illumination taking into account the physical properties of materials, advanced shading effects (shadows, transparency, and 'Ambient occlusion«).

OSPRay exclusively utilizes CPU capabilities without relying on GPU, allowing the library to be used across a wide range of devices, from workstations to nodes in computational clusters. Multithreading and SIMD instruction-based vectorization, such as Intel SSE4, AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512, are actively utilized to ensure adequate performance (at least SSE4.1 support is required for OSPRay).

Rendering can be distributed across multiple cluster nodes (MPI support is included), which, for example, allows OSPRay to manage rendering images with very high resolution on video walls, where a single image is formed by a set of individual LCD panels. For instance, OSPRay's performance has been demonstrated on a composite screen Stallion, assembled from 80 30-inch monitors (total resolution of 40960×8000 or 328 megapixels) and serviced by a cluster of 40 servers with 6-core CPUs based on Intel Sandy Bridge microarchitecture.

A significant version number change is due to a major overhaul of the API, including changes that break compatibility (to simplify the transition to the new API, a bridging library is provided to smooth the migration), and the introduction of new geometric types. Support for Open VKL (Open Volume Kernel Library) has been added for volumetric rendering. The ability to connect for noise suppression in images has been implemented. a module Separate repositories have been created for the ospcommon library and the module for MPI support.

Source: opennet.ru