MantaRay: Open-Source Ray Tracer

Great, another Fabrice Bellard to make us code monkeys look bad ;)

Wow that’s amazing

Nope, there is none. Not even mentioned on the Readme. Somehow people tend to forget the licensing aspect of Open Source, it’s not just putting your code on display

In this case you are technically not even allowed to check it out in most jurisdiction.

No license means no rights.

Nope. Just a name collision.

In terms of quality, the difference between quality of ray tracing engines is mostly up to the user at this point. People who have zero experience with Manta Ray won't be able to do better renders than people with non-zero experience with Cycles, and vice-versa. Same goes if you use Renderman, V-ray, POV-Ray, Mental or any other renderer. In capable hands, they can all do absolutely wonderful renders, but again, mostly up to the user rather than the engine.

In terms of user experience, if you're using Blender, it's much easier to use Cycles as it's already integrated in Blender, while Manta Ray is a standalone renderer.

Blender is not itself a renderer. It comes with (at least) two built-in renderers, Eevee and Cycles, and can be interfaced to many others.

The Getting Started only mentions Visual Studio, but the README only mentions CMake:

> This project was recently migrated to CMake and the setup instructions have changed. They will be updated here shortly.