Open Shading Language

Open Shading Language (OSL) is a shading language developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks for use in its Arnold Renderer. It is also supported by Illumination Research's 3Delight renderer,[2] Otoy's Octane Render, [3] V-Ray 3,[4] Redshift (from April 2021),[5] and the Cycles render engine in Blender (starting with Blender 2.65).[6] OSL's surface and volume shaders define how surfaces or volumes scatter light in a way that allows for importance sampling; thus, it is well suited for physically-based renderers that support ray tracing and global illumination.

Open Shading Language (OSL)

Developer(s)	Academy Software Foundation
Stable release	1.11.17.0 / 10 January 2022 (2022-01-10) [1]
Repository	github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenShadingLanguage
Type	Shading language
License	BSD license 3-clause
Website	github/OpenShadingLanguage

In RenderMan, OSL is also an important module. It is modified there for better Intel AVX2 and AVX-512 advanced vector extension support with doubled performance. SIMD OSL is the product of this Development for Intel SIMD AVX2 and AVX-512 Hardware (Haswell and newer). AMD CPU Hardware with AVX2 support like Ryzen with Zen Architecture can also use this extension. [7][8]

Future release 1.12 will support C++14 as default, but also newer C++17 and C++20. OpenImageIO support will be dropped for 2.0 with support of 2.2. Minimum OpenEXR Version changes up to 2.3. SIMD Batch shader Mode and OptiX support are in development and experimental. CUDA 11 and OptiX 7.1 are here supported levels.[9]