[ANN] RayMakie, the new PBRT based rendering backend!

Package Announcements
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We’ve been working on a new 100% Julia backend for GPU accelerated raytracing for Makie to replace RPRMakie!
Its physically based ray tracing (pbrt) and is pretty much a Julia port of the amazing pbrt-v4 ray tracer.
I also added an experimental rasterizer, which also runs on the GPU via KernelAbstractions - which could pave a way to have a 100% Julia GPU graphics API, which has the potential to rival OpenGL in the future (still pretty hypothetical, we will need to see how it matches performance and how well it works across platforms).
I just want to say, that I’m really happy with how the GPU stack has matured and how it has become possible to write this while reaching performance which is in the same regime as established ray tracers!
Read all the details in https://makie.org/website/blogposts/raytracing/.
1024×768 650 KB
1600×900 1.36 MB
Terrain with volumetric clouds Black hole with gravitational lensing
800×800 474 KB
800×800 1.01 MB
Protein structure from ProtPlot Protein structure (gold, DoF)
1968×1048 2.46 MB
1568×2128 5.63 MB
CMS particle detector (Geant4.jl) CMS detector full view
1600×1200 1.9 MB
1920×1080 2.16 MB
Oil palm (PlantGeom.jl) Stanford bunny cloud (NanoVDB)
2880×1000 2.68 MB
2400×1800 4.66 MB
BOMEX cumulus clouds Christmas tree (GLTF)
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Really cool. My favourite is the gold ball dropping in water, looks gorgeous.

I hope there will be more demo’s at Julia4PDEs 2026 workshop at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam!

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Would it be possible to take advantage of RT-core-like hardware via Vulcan.jl in this context, in principle?

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Awesome work!! Congratulations!

I saw that the post mentions NVIDIA and AMD GPU. What about Metal? Do we have support? If not, is there anything I can do to help supporting it?