Blender 5.3 has arrived with native Gaussian splat support and a switch to Vulkan as the default graphics backend on Windows and Linux.
According to Phoronix, Windows on Arm is excluded from that default change. The Vulkan backend requires version 1.1 or newer and is intended to improve performance over OpenGL.
The free 3D creation suite has plenty of less visible work alongside the rendering changes. Developers have added project management tools and improved video editing.
Native Gaussian splat support lets artists import scenes reconstructed from photographs or video. The technique represents a scene using large numbers of soft, translucent blobs, which sound considerably less impressive than the images they can produce.
Blender imports these from PLY, SPZ and glTF files, storing them as point clouds that users can manipulate through Geometry Nodes. Users can render them in EEVEE and Cycles or preview them in Workbench.
There are limitations. Developers are still optimising performance and warn that colour-space differences can introduce inaccuracies, particularly in bright areas with low opacity.
Nvidia DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction joins Cycles as a denoising option. It combines upscaling with samples from previous frames to produce cleaner viewport previews, helping artists assess lighting without waiting for every last speck of noise to disappear.
The Blender team says this improves responsiveness and reduces flickering during animation playback. DLSS denoising requires Nvidia driver version 620 or newer.
Cycles gains dispersion support in its Principled BSDF shader, allowing glass and gemstones to split white light into its component colours. Artists can now spend their rendering time admiring more convincing diamonds.
EEVEE gains panoramic camera rendering, including fisheye projections. Its current implementation lacks support for depth of field and ray tracing, so you should still check the small print before rearranging a project around it.
The new project system groups related files and resources, with settings such as asset libraries and colour management configured per project. Project-specific add-ons and extensions are coming in later releases.
Video editing gains ripple operations that move subsequent clips as material is inserted, trimmed or deleted. A rewritten blade tool shows where cuts will land, while OpenTimelineIO support helps move editing timelines between applications.
Blender 5.3 is available to download now, with native support and memory optimisations for Nvidia RTX Spark devices running Windows 11.
