Release Notes¶

Version 2026.2¶

Migrated materials from Phong to GGX PBR (metallic-roughness).
Added glTF/GLB mesh loading (tinygltf) with full PBR textures, emissive strength, sRGB formats, KHR_texture_transform, multi-UV sets, and scene-graph flattening at import.
Integrated tone mapping and auto-exposure from nvpro_core2; CLIP tonemapping default; tonemapping parameters in project save/load.
Added IBL environment maps and physical sky background with equirectangular bake; sky specular/reflection; NEE + BRDF path tracing with MIS; removed legacy illumination modes (always path trace with per-material max bounces).
Indirect lighting for splat sets; splat radiance converted from sRGB to linear for PBR.
Extended glTF shading: specular/clearcoat, legacy specular-glossiness workflow.
Particle emissive ambient occlusion for mesh proximity attenuation.

Shared TLAS for per-particle RTX; VRAM lifecycle improvements (release covariance in pure RTX, skip global index table, fewer BLAS/TLAS rebuilds).
Particle depth modes for ray-traced Gaussians, including billboard depth.
Sphere primitive mode via VK_NV_ray_tracing_linear_swept_spheres (plus silhouette wireframe).
Billboard frustum culling; quantizable mesh hit payload; RTX_HAS_MESHES / RTX_HAS_PARTICLES compile-time shader guards; any-hit refactor and stochastic early-out fixes (billboard holes fix).
Other: Clay visualization mode; configurable secondary ray offset; in-memory VkPipelineCache.

Full billboard RT path: intersection shaders, AABB geometry, and billboard ray tracing deep dive.
Bounding modes for TLAS instance scale: Uniform (½, ⅓, ¼), Fitted, Optimal (per-particle), AABB max opacity, icosahedron ellipsoid; default bounding mode is now Uniform ½ (adaptive bounding modes were removed after evaluation).
RTX_SHORTEN_RAY option for stochastic any-hit early termination; billboard depth available for all trace strategies.
Other RTX Fixes: multi–splat-set compositing, light leak, depth incompatibilities, large BLAS build path for bounding modes.

DLSS guide improvements: motion vectors (meshes and splat sets), hardware depth, firefly clamp, min radiance, DLSS_ENABLED compile-time macro.
Skip DLSS for debug visualization modes; fixes for clay mode, splat roughness, and negative radiance clamp on DLSS input.

Renderer UI rework: Denoising, Rasterization, and Raytracing tabs, collapsible groups, tooltips, pipeline selector in menu bar.
View menu: fullscreen, footer bar, window visibility; playback button (replaces keyboard shortcuts); navigation toolbar icons.
DLSS controls moved into denoising tab; tone mapping UI rework.
Per-instance show/hide for splat sets and meshes; profiler and NVML monitor owned by main UI.

Save / Save As projects; renderer settings and tonemapping in project files; project name in title bar.
Asset tree: Settings, Recent Meshes, mesh import modal.
Samples folder with build script for downloading external assets; new and updated sample projects (large city with sky, chessboard winter house, greenhouse on stove scene, and others).
Mesh asset download moved from CMake to the samples build script.

Documentation website (this site), getting started and datasets pages.
Sample projects documentation with image comparison sliders; deep dive links on home page; billboard benchmark documentation.

Billboard benchmark suite: HDR/PNG capture, PSNR, multi-camera, charts, --skip-exec, --saveImage, G-buffer and DLSS guide export.
Headless mode for benchmarks; expanded CLI (camera presets, colorBufferFormat, lightingEnabled, and more). See benchmarking.

HardwareSupport capability registry; optional ray tracing, mesh shader, and LSS sphere extensions with guarded code paths.
Intel Arc support fixes; Linux build fixes.
Upgraded nvpro_core2.

RTX build failure → raster fallback: device lost, shader rebuild, mesh-shader fallback stuck state.
Texture mode in RTX: device lost fixes.
Vulkan validation: pipeline / G-buffer color format mismatch.
Image comparator format mismatch when tonemapping and visual helpers are both active.

Pre-built binaries available on GitHub Releases page
New online documentation website — This site.
Simplified root github repo README.md
Rendering pipeline selector added to the menu bar
Navigation mode icons in toolbar with improved camera controls
Fix profiler reporting during camera drag in raster/hybrid pipelines
Fix 32-bit addressing overflow in sorting buffers by converting to LargeBuffer (supports larger models)

Multi-instance splat set architecture with global index tables and unified sorting
Centralized bindless asset management with a root bindless scene assets buffer
Multi-light lighting system (point / spot / directional, ray traced hard / soft shadows)
Front-to-back rasterization with depth consolidation for lighting
Deferred shading for rasterized Gaussian splats
GPU-built particle acceleration structures with multi-TLAS / multi-BLAS chunking and VRAM budget pre-checking
Ray tracing now supports very large models and updates faster
Stochastic splat sorting and Monte Carlo trace strategy for enhanced interactivity
DLSS Ray Reconstruction for anti-aliasing, upscaling and denoising
Expanded visualization modes in ray tracing and hybrid pipelines (normals, depth, DLSS buffers, splat ID)
UI / UX enhancements (summary overlay, shader feedback and ray hit profile, editing mode)
3D transform and infinite grid visual helpers
Runtime image comparison tool with MSE / PSNR / FLIP metrics
Added Winter house and Large city models from teleportour.com to datasets page. Thanks to Andrii Shramko.

[2025/10] Migration from GLSL to SLANG.
[2025/09] Added Unscented Transform (3DGUT) and hybrid rendering (3DGUT/3DGRT) pipelines, with support for fisheye and depth of field.
[2025/09] Added import of .spz file format from nianticlabs.
[2025/08] Added depth of field to raytracing (3DGRT) pipeline.
[2025/08] Added raytracing (3DGRT) and hybrid rendering (3DGS/3DGRT) pipelines + 3DGRT dataset.
[2025/08] Added compositing with meshes and project save/load functionality.
[2025/06] Ported to new NVIDIA DesignWorks nvpro_core2.
[2025/03] Added new models from 3ds-scan.de. Thanks to Christian Rochner.
[2025/03] First release with 3DGS rasterization.