Coming four months after Blender 5.2 LTS, the Blender 5.3 release enables the Vulkan backend by default on Linux, replacing the OpenGL backend, with the minimum Vulkan requirements being lowered to Vulkan 1.1 and some GPU/driver features made optional to support more devices.
Blender 5.3 also adds support for hardware ray-traced shadows in Workbench with both Vulkan and Metal backends, full sun disc support for sky textures, support for panoramic cameras, as well as new Material Lighting nodes, including Light Accumulation, Light Info, Light Evaluation, Shadow Raycast, Attribute (Light Mode), and Vector Transform (Light Space).
