Blender 5.3 is in beta, with Gaussian splats and DLSS denoising

On October 8, Blender's Thomas Dinges announced that 5.3 is in beta, bug fixing only, and 5.4 development has started in main. The 5.3 milestone puts the release candidate on November 4 and the release on November 10, 2026. Blender's 5.3 page lists DLSS denoising, Gaussian Splatting, Blender Projects, and an improved Video Sequencer among the headline features.

Gaussian splats

From the 5.3 rendering notes:

• Splats are imported from PLY and SPZ files (SPZ up to version 4) and stored as point clouds with a new Type option.
• Workbench, EEVEE, and Cycles can all render them, with an emissive shader by default.
• Rudimentary relighting works by swapping the Emission node for a BSDF.
• New Geometry Nodes: Set Point Cloud Type and Import SPZ.

Blender lists the limits plainly: performance is not ideal, rendering is not fully correct because splats are assumed to be trained in sRGB, Apply Transform does not work correctly on splats, and there is no export.

DLSS denoising

NVIDIA said in June that Cycles would get DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction as a new denoiser in 5.3, Digital Production reported. It works on GeForce RTX GPUs. The report says Blender has not spelled out minimum GPU or driver versions.

What it costs

Blender is free. DLSS needs an NVIDIA RTX card.

Should you switch

Not for production yet. Beta builds are for testing, and the splat notes say the feature is still incomplete. If you work with photo-scanned splats, it is worth trying the beta on a copy of a scene and filing bugs before November 4.