ANARI - Cross-Platform 3D Rendering Engine API

ANARI - Cross-Platform 3D Rendering Engine API
The ANARI Cross-Platform 3D Rendering Engine API
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 need for low-level graphics code, and enabling the use of any 3D rendering engine that supports the ANARI API. 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.
LATEST NEWS
ANARI 1.1 Preview
Expanding Capabilities with New Features
On
August 7, 2025
the ANARI Working Group voted on a feature freeze for ANARI 1.1, allowing us to confidently preview the new capabilities that will be introduced in the specification. Building on the solid foundation of ANARI 1.0, which launched in August 2023, version 1.1 introduces substantial enhancements that expand the API's flexibility and power.
New Geometry and Scene Structure Additions
New Spatial Field Additions
Performance and Scalability Improvements
Rendering Enhancements
Blog Post: ANARI Version 1.1
Other News
Highlights from the ANARI Hackathon 2025
VisIt Embraces ANARI for Advanced Scientific Visualization
Kitware Introduces ANARI Capability Analysis Tool
Data-Parallel Rendering with ANARI
New ANARI SDK Updates and Hackathon Results
New ANARI SDK Upgrades and Releases ANARI 1.0 Adopter Program
All ANARI News
Specs & Dev Tools
Key ANARI Resources
Thanks to the support of the Khronos membership and our passionate developer community, there is a full set of well-supported developer tools and resources to help quickly get your application development using ANARI.
Specification
Open Source SDK
The
ANARI Capability Analysis Tool (CAT)
, developed by Kitware
Provide
Feedback on the Spec and SDK
The Analytic Rendering Interface
About ANARI
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.
ANARI 1.1 Preview Blog Post
ANARI 1.0 Press Release
ANARI 1.0 Launch Presentation
A Consistent Platform
ANARI Implementations
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.
AMD:
RadeonProRender
Intel:
OSPRay
NVIDIA:
VisRTX
Growing Ecosystem
ANARI Applications and Add-ons
VMD Rendering using ANARI. Image courtesy of the University of Illinois.
Since the launch of ANARI 1.0 in 2023, we've seen remarkable adoption across the scientific visualization community. Major applications including VMD, VTK/ParaView, and VisIt have integrated ANARI support, while various implementations (OSPRay, VisRTX, Barney, Visionaray, Cycles, etc.) provide access to cutting-edge rendering engines across diverse hardware platforms.
VMD
- Molecular Visualization Dynamics
ParaView
- Multi-platform data analysis and visualization (based on VTK)
VTK
- The Visualization Toolkit
VisIt
- Interactive, scalable, visualization, animation and analysis tool
USD device for ANARI
- ANARI USD output for NVIDIA Omniverse
Blender Add-on
- ANARI backends renderers in blender
Visionary
- ANARI device over the Visionaray ray tracing library
Barney
- ANARI compliant GPU-accelerated path tracer
Software Development Kit
The ANARI Open Source SDK
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, and the ‘Helide’ ANARI sample implementation that demonstrates API implementation choices and shows how ANARI implementations can integrate with the SDK.
Device Implementation Guide
Device Implementation Library (Helium)
Example Device Implementation (Helide)
Example Applications
Capability Analysis Tool
Render Tests
OpenUSD Hydra Plugin (Experimental)
ANARI SDK
Get Involved
Join the ANARI Community
The ANARI specification development process remains fully open to community input. Whether you're interested in providing feedback on the specification, contributing to the SDK, implementing ANARI with your renderer, or joining the working group, there are multiple ways to get involved:
To provide feedback on the ANARI Specification, file an issue in the
KhronosGroup/ANARI-Docs
GitHub project.
To provide feedback on the ANARI SDK, file an issue in the
KhronosGroup/ANARI-SDK
GitHub project.
Share your feedback on
Khronos Discord
Subscribe to the
Khronos ANARI Newsletter
Participate directly in the ongoing development of the ANARI by
Joining the ANARI Working Group
at Khronos
Ecosystem Adoption
Strong ANARI Industry Support
All layers in the scientific visualization stack are represented in the ANARI eco-system including GPU vendors, rendering engines, visualization libraries, tools and applications.
“The ANARI rendering API is a big step in standardizing the pipeline of scientific rendering, allowing developers and scientists to write code once and render in many places without needing to know the specifics of the device. We look forward to supporting multiple platforms for GPU and CPU rendering via our Radeon ProRender backend for ANARI at GPUOpen.com.”
Brian Savery
Radeon™ ProRender software lead, AMD
“As a recognized contributor to open, standards-based platforms and ecosystems, Intel welcomes the release of the high-level rendering API specification ANARI, led by the Khronos Group. The ANARI working group found the delicate balance between providing ease-of-use for applications development and delivering capabilities for high-performance implementations by vendors. Intel
supports the ANARI API with an open-source implementation based on Intel® OSPRay (part of the Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit), contributing expertise and technologies to advance high-fidelity rendering for Digital Twins, scalable scientific visualization in HPC and more to all ANARI users”
Anton Kaplanyan
AXG chief technology officer and ​​​​​​​vice president, Graphics Research Organization at Intel
“At Kitware, scientific and medical visualization are core to our business. Hence, it is essential that our software stack stays up to date with the latest rendering techniques and works across multiple platforms and library implementations. With ANARI, we can leverage various backends providing advanced ray tracing capabilities through a single API. For toolkits such as VTK and
VTK-m and for end user applications such as ParaView, ANARI is a huge win, giving us access to many rendering engines without the prohibitive per-engine development costs.”
Berk Geveci
Senior director of scientific computing at Kitware
“NVIDIA is excited to bring RTX accelerated rendering technologies to the ANARI ecosystem. Beginning with our own VisRTX implementation, we want users to have easy access to hardware accelerated ray tracing to better accomplish their work visualizing 3D data. Furthermore, our ANARI-USD implementation marks a low-friction pathway for existing 3D applications to connect themselves to our ever-growing Omniverse platform - seamlessly using their existing ANARI code to translate their data to USD. Whether it's accelerating existing 3D applications or creating new ones with Omniverse, ANARI makes it easier than ever to take advantage of NVIDIA's contributions to the 3D visualization industry.”
Peter Messmer
Director of HPC developer technology at NVIDIA
Help Drive the Evolution of ANARI
Join Khronos and the ANARI Working Group
The ANARI Working Group is actively driving the evolution of the standard and the broader ecosystem. Any organization is welcome to join Khronos to shape this important global initiative under the group’s multi-company, consensus-based governance process. Khronos has multiple levels of membership to enable any organization, large or small to get involved. If you want to participate directly in the development of the ANARI standard please consider joining the Khronos Group.
Join the Khronos Group
Current Khronos Members
Adopt Khronos Standards
Contact
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
for additional information
Additional Resources
Siggraph 2023 BOF:
ANARI: The Industry’s First Portable Rendering Engine API
Presentation:
Portable and Scalable 3D Rendering Using ANARI
NVIDIA GTC, 2023. (login required)
Webinar:
Khronos ANARI Webinar, March 2022
'A Tour of the ANARI API' presented by Jefferson Amstutz, NVIDIA and ANARI Working Group Chair.
'Experiences with Adopting ANARI in Existing Visualization Applications' presented by John Stone, University of Illinois.
'How to Create an ANARI Implementation' presented by Johannes Günther, Intel.
Journal Article:
ANARI: A 3D Rendering API Standard
. IEEE CiSe, 2022.
Stay Informed
Subscribe to the Khronos Newsletter
Click to Subscribe
Stay in the loop by subscribing to our newsletter to receive updates on all our latest resources, news and events.
By subscribing you are consenting to receive marketing emails about news and events relating to the Khronos Group. You can unsubscribe at any time by following the “Unsubscribe” link included in each email sent. For information on our privacy practices and commitment to protecting your privacy, please review our
. We do not sell your contact information to third parties.
Khronos Standard Additional links and information
Related Discussions
ANARI for particle transport support
ANARI Hackathon - October 21-23, 2024
ANARI Virtual Hackathon - Call for Proposals
Khronos Ships New ANARI SDK Upgrades and Releases ANARI 1.0 Adopter Program
Anari suitable for real time VR?
Visit Community Forums
Visit Khronos Discord
Visit Vulkan Discord
Related News
Advancing Scientific Visualization: Highlights from the ANARI Virtual Hackathon 2025
Khronos Group at SIGGRAPH
ANARI at SIGGRAPH 2025: Major Updates to the Industry’s First Cross-Platform Rendering Engine API
Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2025
VisIt Embraces ANARI for Advanced Scientific Visualization
More news
Related Press
Khronos Releases ANARI 1.0 Provisional API for Scalable 3D Data Visualization
Khronos to Develop ‘ANARI’  Analytic Rendering Interface API Standard
More Press Releases
devilish