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