Features
The following summarizes the important features of ParaView.

- Software Architecture

- Open-source
- Uses C++ to drive the Tk widget set.
- Portable across Windows and Unix systems
- Built on the standard open-source VTK visualization system
- Modular GUI may be extended to support your own tools
- The application may be extended at run-time via Tcl scripting
- Transparent multi-processor support
- Supports data-streaming. (Has been used to process 1-pedabyte in a single run on a 2048 processor machine.)
- VTK or user-defined filters can be easily added.

- Visualization Capabilities

- Reads and writes a variety of data formats including Ensight, VTK, Plot3D, Wavefront, STL, etc.
- Supports several source objects (e.g., lines, planes, spheres, implicit functions, point clouds, etc.) used for probing, generating streamlines, cutting, and representing geometry.
- A large library of visualization filters are available. These include isocontouring, cutting, clipping, color mapping, decimation, outlines, geometry extraction and glyphing.
- Supports different interaction styles, switchable at run-time. Users can add their own interaction styles.
- Annotation features such as scalar bars; 2D (fixed) and 3D (moves with object) text are available.
- Picking
- LOD displays allows for user trade-off between rendering fidelity and frame rate.

- Parallel Processing

- Supports parallel software rendering (tree composite with LOD)
- Algorithms implemented in parallel
- Data parallelism is supported
- Supports MPI and shared memory architectures