Intel recently released the latest version of its scalable 3D-rendering engine, ospray 3.0. The engine is designed for realistic high-quality visualization by tracing rays. Ospray is part of the larger project called Intel Rendering Framework, which aims to develop software visualization tools for scientific calculations, including the library of rays trace embree, the system of photorealistic rendering gluray, the library to eliminate noise in images known as Open Image Denoise (OIDN), and the system of software rasterization Openswr. The code is written in C++ and is published under the Apache 2.0 license.
Ospray is primarily focused on providing real-time visualization for interactive applications. It uses the method of tracing paths to simulate light behavior. The engine supports visualization in volume and on the plane, with photorealistic global lighting that takes into account the physical properties of materials. It also includes expanded shadow effects such as shadows, transparency, and ambient occlusion.
One of the key features of Ospray is its ability to work without relying on the GPU, making it suitable for a wide range of devices from workstations to computing clusters. To ensure optimal performance, Ospray utilizes multi-threading and vectorization based on SIMD instructions like Intel SSE4, AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512 (SSE4.1 support is required for Ospray).
Ospray also supports distributed rendering across multiple cluster components using MPI, allowing users to generate images with very high resolutions. For example, Ospray has been demonstrated on the composite screen called Stallion, which consists of 80 30-inch monitors and has a total resolution of 40960×8000 or 328 megapixels. This setup is powered by a cluster of 40 servers with 6-core CPUs based on the Intel Sandy Bridge microarchitecture.
Some of the added changes in ospray 3.0 include: