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Simplifies development of portable 3D visualization applications using state-of-the-art rendering; Multiple implementations and open-source SDK shipping
On August 2, 2023 the Khronos Group announced that the ANARI 1.0 open standard, cross-platform 3D rendering engine API has been finalized and that multiple implementations are shipping from AMD, Intel and NVIDIA, together with an open-source software development kit (SDK) from Khronos.
“Historically, visualization applications required custom-written renderers, but fast moving advances in rendering algorithms, hardware, and associated low-level GPU APIs have made it increasingly difficult for domain experts to keep pace with modern rendering methods. The result of a three year effort by industry-leading experts working together at Khronos, ANARI now simplifies the development of portable 3D visualization applications that use backend engines to access state-of-the-art rendering. We thank the scientific visualization community for their invaluable assistance in refining ANARI’s design, and now we are excited to see how other application domains take advantage of the industry’s first vendor- and ecosystem- independent rendering engine API.”
ANARI is a C99 API with C++ type-safe wrappers that is used to build an in-memory hierarchical object tree that expresses the complete scene for a single frame, including 3D surface geometry and volumetric data. ANARI provides rendering engines the semantics to expose innovation through extensions; access asynchronous scene updates and zero-copy data arrays for low frame latency; and ultimately create beautifully rendered state-of-the-art imagery without the need for proprietary APIs, all while enabling the interactivity necessary for exploratory visualization.
The ANARI 1.0 specification was developed with full public access to draft specifications and incorporates significant community feedback, including improvements to the object interface, better error handling through guaranteed API stream robustness, revamped runtime feature queries, directly mapped array parameters, improved volume shading, and compatibility with the Khronos glTF Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials.
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NVIDIA VisRTX rendering using ANARI. San Miguel
scene
© Guillermo M. Leal Llaguno
The Rendering engines below now support the ANARI device API and are expected to be officially conformant when the ANARI 1.0 Adopters Program is released.
The following applications and add-ons support the ANARI API.
The ANARI SDK streamlines developer’s’ exploration and use of the API and contains example applications, including a simple interactive viewer demonstrating various ANARI concepts, together with development tools including a debug layer for API stream validation, and a layer for API call tracing and replay. For ANARI implementers, the SDK includes backend layers that implement common functionality such as handling parameters or object lifetime, a Python-based Conformance Test Suite, and the ‘Helide’ ANARI sample implementation that demonstrates API implementation choices and shows how ANARI implementations can integrate with the SDK.
All layers in the scientific visualization stack are represented in the ANARI eco-system including GPU vendors, rendering engines, visualization libraries, tools and applications.
There are several ways to follow the latest ANARI developments, provide feedback on the specification, and get your questions answered.
Join Khronos. If you would like to participate directly in the ongoing development of the ANARI standard please join Khronos and become a member of the ANARI Working Group.
Join the Khronos Group