Blender 5.3 Released with Native Gaussian Splat Support and Rendering Upgrades

The Blender Foundation and its online community have officially launched Blender 5.3, wrapping up the year with substantial feature additions and performance improvements across the board. The headlining feature of this release is native support for 3D Gaussian Splats. Users can import them from PLY and SPZ files as point clouds, subsequently editing and processing them with Geometry Nodes, and relighting or rendering them directly within Workbench, EEVEE, and Cycles.

Rendering capabilities have been significantly expanded, with Vulkan now serving as the default backend on Windows and Linux systems. Cycles has added dispersion and anisotropic roughness to better replicate physical glass and gemstone properties, while EEVEE introduces Material Lighting Nodes, panoramic cameras, and full sky texture support. Additionally, NVIDIA GPU users benefit from a new viewport DLSS denoiser for faster, cleaner sample upscaling.

Further updates touch nearly every module in the software, including new volume grid nodes in Geometry Nodes to build foundations for custom fluid simulations, a node-based effect stack in the Compositor, and new selection and cutting tools in Grease Pencil. The Video Sequencer has also been upgraded with a complete ripple editing framework and initial OpenTimelineIO support, offering a more robust pipeline for multimedia creators.