MoonRay is a high-performance renderer from DreamWorks featuring quality ray tracing. The renderer was designed to leverage "all cores of all machines" consistently and has a hybrid GPU/CPU rendering mode with "100% pixel-perfect match" to CPU rendering. MoonRay is capable of producing both stylized and photorealistic renders, and it boasts key features expected from VFX visualization tools, including AOV/LPE, depth output, and Cryptomatte.

MoonRay can be integrated as a viewport renderer into DCC applications that support Hydra, such as Houdini and Katana.
In MoonRay version 1.5, support for the CY2023 specification for the VFX Reference Platform has been added, as well as support for Rocky Linux 9, allowing for MoonRay builds in addition to CentOS. According to the release notes, CY2023 support enables the use of hdMoonRay in Nuke 15 - the current version of the compositing software from Foundry. Additionally, the update introduces a new adaptive light sampling scheme for the first time.

Among other new features introduced after the release of MoonRay 1.0 are a new volume controller and telemetry overlay system. The program now also supports GPU denoising through Open Image Denoise 2, and the XPU mode - a hybrid CPU/GPU rendering - is now the default rendering mode in MoonRay. Additionally, there is now a separate branch of MoonRay development with support for VR rendering via the PresenZ volumetric format.

MoonRay is available under the Apache 2.0 open-source license. The software can be compiled from source code only on Linux. The list of dependencies and build instructions can be found in the online documentation. It requires an x86-64 processor with AVX2 support, so it should run on any recent AMD or Intel processor. GPU acceleration is based on CUDA and OptiX and requires an Nvidia GPU.