Khronos Launches ANARI 1.0 as the Industry’s First Cross-Platform 3D Rendering Engine Open Standard API

The Khronos Group announces 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. ANARI significantly simplifies the development of applications in domains such as scientific visualization by providing high-level functionality to build an in-memory scene representation to be rendered without the need for low-level graphics code and enabling the use of any 3D rendering engine that supports the ANARI API. The ANARI 1.0 specification has been openly developed and incorporates significant community feedback, including compatibility with glTF Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials. ANARI has already been widely integrated into scientific visualization applications and is expected to be used by diverse applications needing portable access to multiple rendering engines delivering sophisticated 3D functionality such as ray tracing and global illumination. Khronos welcomes feedback from the developer community at the ANARI GitHub.

As the industry’s first platform-independent 3D rendering engine API, ANARI has broad industry support from scientific visualization developers with integration into leading open source applications including VMD, VTK/ParaView, and VisIt. ANARI implementations are shipping today from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA to provide access to their RadeonProRender, OSPRay and VisRTX rendering engines. There is also a proof-of-concept Blender ANARI add-on in the ANARI SDK, and NVIDIA’s ANARI-USD implementation enabling any ANARI application to generate USD output for use in the Omniverse platform.