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
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.
Other News
Specs & Dev Tools
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.
The Analytic Rendering Interface
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
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.
Growing Ecosystem
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.
Software Development Kit
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.
Get Involved
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:
Ecosystem Adoption
All layers in the scientific visualization stack are represented in the ANARI eco-system including GPU vendors, rendering engines, visualization libraries, tools and applications.
Help Drive the Evolution of ANARI
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.