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
OnAugust 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
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.
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)
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 theKhronosGroup/ANARI-Docs GitHub project.
- To provide feedback on the ANARI SDK, file an issue in theKhronosGroup/ANARI-SDK GitHub project.
- Share your feedback onKhronos Discord
- Subscribe to theKhronos ANARI Newsletter
- Participate directly in the ongoing development of the ANARI byJoining 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.”
“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”
“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.”
“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.”
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.
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