# EmbarkStudios/kajiya

💡 Experimental real-time global illumination renderer 🦀

Repository: https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/kajiya
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/kajiya
Language: Rust
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Archived: true
Last push: 2025-07-07T21:27:20+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 10/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 30, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 1986, "days_push": 422, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases, archived
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 5339, forks 213 (observed 2026-08-28T04:09:15.836849+00:00)

## What it is
Kajiya is an experimental real-time global illumination renderer written in Rust on Vulkan, hybridizing rasterization, compute, and hardware ray tracing to approximate path-traced lighting in fully dynamic scenes without precomputed light transport. It is a hobby project that is no longer maintained, intended as an artisanal reference of rendering techniques rather than a production-ready renderer.

## Use cases
- render dynamic scenes with real-time global illumination
- approximate path-traced reference lighting without precomputed light probes
- study how ray-traced shadows, specular, and irradiance caches are implemented
- learn real-time rendering techniques from a Rust and Vulkan codebase
- experiment with hybrid raster, compute, and ray-tracing pipelines
- render PBR scenes with energy-conserving GGX materials

## When to choose
- you want to study modern real-time GI techniques like volumetric temporally-recurrent irradiance caches in working code
- you are experimenting with Rust and Vulkan for graphics programming
- you need a runnable renderer to visualize demo scenes with dynamic lighting
- you want to see 'artisanal hacks' and shortcuts used to hit real-time rates

## When to avoid
- you need a fully-featured renderer to ship a game or support diverse scenes and hardware
- you expect maintenance, bug fixes, or updates, since the project is explicitly unmaintained
- you need a polished, reusable rendering library or engine with stable APIs
- your GPU lacks hardware ray tracing support

## Facets
- artifact type: application
- maturity: abandoned
- function: graphics
- domain: graphics, simulation
- platform: rust, windows
- tags: real-time-rendering, global-illumination, vulkan, ray-tracing, path-tracing, pbr, irradiance-cache, hdr, unmaintained, hobby-project, game-development, linux, gpu

## Member repositories
- EmbarkStudios/kajiya (main) score 10

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:09:15.836849+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T17:58:50.207995+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/kajiya (fetched 2026-08-28T04:09:15.836849+00:00, sha dced7a9de9ac)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.