# Using ParaView without rendering?

**URL:** https://discourse.paraview.org/t/using-paraview-without-rendering/5634
**Category:** ParaView Support
**Created:** [October 22, 2020, 5:44pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/using-paraview-without-rendering/5634 "2020-10-22T17:44:18Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Noam\_Gat](https://discourse.paraview.org/user_avatar/discourse.paraview.org/noam_gat/32/5177_2.png) [@Noam\_Gat](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/Noam_Gat)
#### Post date: [October 22, 2020, 5:44pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/using-paraview-without-rendering/5634/1 "2020-10-22T17:44:18Z")

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Hi,  
I am looking at Paraview for ray traced simulation needs.  
Simply put, I have a lot (thousands if not more) of static scenes (but programatically generated) containing between 1k-10k cubes, and I would like to raycast about 100k rays (Different starting points, different directions) on each scene, and get statistics on ray hit distance etc.  
Is this something paraview can be ideal for? I was looking for examples and couldn’t find anything remotely similar.  
How would Paraview’s performance handle this?

Thanks for any pointers 🙂

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### Author: ![mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/user_avatar/discourse.paraview.org/mwestphal/32/17_2.png) [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [October 23, 2020, 7:47am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/using-paraview-without-rendering/5634/2 "2020-10-23T07:47:24Z")

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ParaView without rendering is possible (osmesa, pvbatch) but you seem to be asking a completely different question in the text body.

Raytracing in ParaView is purely an visualization tool, not an analysis tool.