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, Otoy's Octane Render, V-Ray 3, and by the Cycles render engine in Blender (starting with Blender 2.65). 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.

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.

Future release 1.12 will support C++14 as default. OpenImageIO support will be dropped for 2.0 with support of 2.1-2.3. SIMD Batch shader Mode and OptiX support are in development and experimental. CUDA 11 and OptiX 7.1 are here supported levels.