Blender 5.3, the new version of the free and open-source 3D suite, was released on 10 November 2026. Its headline feature is native support for 3D Gaussian splats, the photo-based 3D scenes many capture apps now produce; until now they needed outside add-ons. The release reached 391 points on Hacker News on its first day.
Gaussian splats: Blender imports splats from PLY and SPZ files (VP Land also lists glTF), stores them as a new point-cloud type that Geometry Nodes can process, and renders them in EEVEE, Cycles and Workbench. By default they render with an emissive shader; connecting a Diffuse BSDF gives what VP Land calls "rudimentary" relighting. Limits: no splat export yet, performance is still being optimised, and colours can be off because most splat tools work in sRGB while Blender works in linear colour.
Rendering: Cycles gets a denoiser based on NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction (NVIDIA driver 620 or newer), for near-final quality in the viewport and less flicker. The Principled BSDF gains dispersion for rainbow fringes in glass and gems, and EEVEE now supports panoramic cameras such as equirectangular and fisheye, matching Cycles. Depth of field and raytracing do not work with them yet.
Video and graphics: the Video Sequencer adds ripple editing, a rewritten Blade tool with live preview and initial OpenTimelineIO import and export. Vulkan replaces OpenGL as the default graphics backend on Linux and on Windows (except ARM), with Vulkan 1.1 as the minimum, according to Maverick Frame.
