Khronos Releases ANARI 1.0 As Cross-Platform 3D Rendering Engine API

For several years now The Khronos Group has been developing the ANARI standard as an analytics rendering API and focusing on scalable 3D data virtualization. Today the ANARI 1.0 release finally took place for this cross-platform 3D rendering engine API.

The ANARI 1.0 open standard was published today for this 3D rendering engine API and implementations expected from the likes of AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA. This new standard is described as:

"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.
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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."

AMD is expected to provide ANARI integration with Radeon ProRender, Intel to provide ANARI integration with OSPRay, and NVIDIA to incorporate support into the VisRTX rendering engine.

More details on the ANARI 1.0 release via Khronos.org.