Blender 5.3 is out now as the latest version of this free and open-source 3D creation suite. It includes native Gaussian Splatting support, Vulkan as the default graphics backend on Linux, new project management features, and improvements to the rendering and video editing tools.
For Linux users, the big change is that Vulkan is now the default graphics backend (replacing OpenGL). The same applies to Windows (with the exception of ARM devices). The minimum Vulkan version requirement has also been reduced to 1.1, and several GPU and driver features are now optional to improve hardware compatibility.
Blender developers have also been working on optimizing Vulkan performance. Published benchmarks show performance improvements in a number of the tested scenes, though the results are highly dependent on the workload and the graphics hardware in question.
Another big one is native 3D Gaussian Splatting support, a technique that’s been used to reconstruct 3D scenes from photos or video. Blender now supports importing Gaussian splats in PLY and SPZ formats, storing them as point clouds, manipulating them via Geometry Nodes, and rendering them with Cycles, EEVEE, or Workbench.
The implementation is still being worked on, with performance issues and some rendering inaccuracies (particularly around transparency and lighting) being acknowledged.
Blender 5.3 also brings Blender Projects (optional), which is a system for organizing work that is spread across multiple .blend files. Rather than managing the individual files separately, you can define a project directory with shared asset libraries, path variables, and project-specific OpenColorIO config.
On the render side, Cycles now has dispersion support in the Principled BSDF shader (enabling more realistic separation of light into different colors as it passes through transparent materials). NVIDIA DLSS denoising is also available for viewport rendering, and there are further shader improvements to the handling of transparent materials.
EEVEE gets new Material Lighting nodes which allow artists to control how the material reacts to individual lights. Very useful for stylized rendering (e.g. toon shading). The engine also gets panoramic camera support and improved Sky Texture rendering.
The Video Sequencer has been through a massive overhaul with a new ripple edit system which will automatically shift all the clips that follow when a clip is inserted, trimmed, or deleted. The Blade tool has been completely rewritten with much improved visual feedback, and we now have initial OpenTimelineIO import and export support, which makes it a lot easier to exchange editing timelines with other applications.
Playback performance has also been improved, especially around the video cuts. Experimental hardware-accelerated video decoding is also available as an option.
The UI includes several useful improvements too. Objects and collections can now be manually arranged in the Outliner (rather than being auto-sorted). Sidebar search is now available across all the editors, and there’s a new Comment node which supports Markdown for commenting on complex node trees.
Other changes include improvements to the sculpting and painting tools, the animation workflows, and asset management. The USD importer can now be linked to collections to facilitate repeated imports, and glTF and Alembic support has been extended.
Finally, Blender 5.3 raises the minimum supported macOS version to macOS 13 Ventura. Blender 5.2 LTS is the last version to be supported on macOS 11.2 and macOS 12.
Blender 5.3 installers are available from the download directory for Linux, Windows, and macOS. For more details on the changes, see the release notes.
