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

sdanisch
Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:09:46 +0000
Package Announcements

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/.

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Terrain with volumetric clouds | Black hole with gravitational lensing
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Protein structure from ProtPlot | Protein structure (gold, DoF)
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CMS particle detector (Geant4.jl) | CMS detector full view
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Oil palm (PlantGeom.jl) | Stanford bunny cloud (NanoVDB)
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BOMEX cumulus clouds | Christmas tree (GLTF)

18 posts - 9 participants