Blender 5.3 adds 3D Gaussian splats, Vulkan by default on Windows/Linux & a DLSS denoiser

The Blender Foundation has released Blender 5.3, delivering new features and improvements across the board. Headlining the release is native support for 3D Gaussian splats, a rapidly growing technique for capturing and representing real-world 3D scenes. Users can now import splats from PLY and SPZ files as point clouds, then edit and process them with geometry nodes before relighting and rendering them in any of Blender's three render engines: Workbench, EEVEE, and Cycles. The release also strengthens asset workflows, allowing asset libraries to be shared as extensions, while the extensions' platform now accepts libraries containing public-domain (CC0) assets.

Rendering sees notable upgrades as well. Cycles adds dispersion and anisotropic roughness for glass and transmissive materials, enabling accurate reproduction of the rainbow effects seen in glassware and gemstones. EEVEE introduces material lighting nodes for precise control over how materials respond to light, useful for stylized NPR work as well as physical effects like iridescence, alongside panoramic cameras and the full sky texture sun disc. Performance is also addressed: a new DLSS denoiser on NVIDIA GPUs delivers cleaner viewport images faster by upscaling and reusing samples from prior frames, native support arrives for NVIDIA RTX Spark devices running Windows 11, and Vulkan becomes the default graphics backend on Windows (except ARM) and Linux. Workbench additionally gains hardware raytraced shadows on Metal and Vulkan.

Beyond rendering, the release touches nearly every corner of the application. Grease pencil gains selection tools in draw mode and a new carver tool for cutting shapes via boolean subtraction, while the video sequencer receives a full ripple editing framework, a rewritten blade tool, and initial OpenTimelineIO support. A new optional project system makes Blender aware of context beyond the open .blend file, and animation & rigging add operators for copying and pasting world-space animation and converting rotation modes.