Blender 5.3 Released With NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, Vulkan Default

Blender 5.3 is out today as the newest stable release for this leading open-source 3D modeling software. Blender 5.3 introduces 3D Gaussian Splats to reconstruct 3D scenes from photos or videos. Blender now allows importing Gaussian Splats from PLY, SPZ, and glTF files. Also new to Blender 5.3 is NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction support as a new denoiser. Blender 5.3 also brings support for NVIDIA RTX Spark devices. For the Cycles code in Blender 5.3 the Principled BSDF for shader nodes now supports dispersion. Another notable change with Blender 5.3 is the Vulkan back-end now being the default on Windows (except for Windows on ARM) and Linux systems. Vulkan 1.1 or newer is required and should deliver better performance than OpenGL. Blender 5.3 downloads and more details on Blender.org. New Blender benchmarks soon on Phoronix.