Blender 5.3 adds NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction and Vulkan default

Blender 5.3 is available now. The update makes Vulkan the default back-end for Linux and Windows, though Windows on ARM users are excluded. Using Vulkan 1.1 or newer should provide better performance than OpenGL.

Image: Phoronix

Blender 5.3 adds support for NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction to act as a new denoiser. The software also supports NVIDIA RTX Spark devices. Cycles users can now enable dispersion in the Principled BSDF node.

The update includes native 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct 3D scenes from video or photos. Users can import Gaussian Splats using glTF, PLY, and SPZ files.