Beta 1.0.2 · Spectra for Blender

Light, solved
as a wave.

Spectra Render™ is the Reality Engine: the first realtime wave-optics path tracer. Spectral, polarized and unbiased by construction, live in Blender's viewport on any ray-tracing GPU.

Join the beta See it live
380460540620700780 nm

Every path carries four hero wavelengths stratified across the visible band, along with its full Stokes polarization state. There are no RGB approximations anywhere in the transport, and it runs on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel ray-tracing GPUs.

This is the viewport.

Every clip here was captured live from Blender's Rendered viewport. Scene state lives on the GPU: move the camera and it retraces, drag a material slider and one constant updates. Nothing recompiles, nothing re-uploads.

Physics that RGB renderers can only fake.

Wave optics by construction

Maxwell is the substrate, not a post-process. Interference, diffraction and polarization are computed per beam rather than painted on.

Spectral, always

Hero-wavelength transport across 380–780 nm on every path. There is no spectral mode to switch on, because spectral is the only mode.

Stokes & Mueller

Light carries its full polarization state. Fresnel reflection polarizes the way real glass and water do.

Fire in every facet

Wavelength-dependent index of refraction splits white light into rainbows. Diamonds sparkle because the physics says so.

Thin film & diffraction

Soap bubbles, oil slicks, gratings and edge diffraction come out of the transport as first-class effects, straight from your Principled BSDF.

ReSTIR-WO

Spatiotemporal resampling built for wave optics drives noise down at interactive rates. The core underneath stays unbiased.

DLSS Ray Reconstruction

On NVIDIA RTX the viewport reconstructs with DLSS-RR. Every other GPU gets Intel Open Image Denoise.

Built for vast scenes

Instanced geometry shares a single acceleration structure, so a forest costs its geometry memory only once.

An addon, not a fork

Install a zip into stock Blender. Spectra uses your Principled materials, lights, cameras and colour management, with nothing to convert.

Graded against physics, not taste.

Spectra is checked against a ladder of reference renderers. Any change that touches a BSDF, Fresnel or the wave path has to reproduce double-slit fringe parity before it ships.

Young's double slit · Spectra
Double-slit interference fringes rendered by Spectra
  1. CyclesSanity oracle: scenes are matched geometry-for-geometry before any comparison is made.
  2. wave_tracerAsymptotic Maxwell reference: elliptical-cone beams and near-field diffraction (Steinberg & Pharr, Wave Tracing).
  3. BEMsim3DFull-wave arbiter: a boundary-element Maxwell solver has the final word.

Every ray-tracing GPU.

Spectra runs on Vulkan KHR ray tracing rather than a single vendor's API. Linux, Windows and Apple Silicon macOS.

GPUStatusViewport denoiseNotes
NVIDIA RTXValidatedDLSS Ray ReconstructionPrimary validated hardware, from laptop RTX to dual RTX 5090.
AMD Radeon RTExperimentalOpen Image DenoiseExposes the required Vulkan RT extensions.
Intel ArcExperimentalOpen Image DenoiseExposes the required Vulkan RT extensions.
Apple SiliconNewest portOpen Image DenoiseM-series Macs through a bundled MoltenVK-based Vulkan layer. Unified memory keeps textures at full resolution.
Blender 5.1+ (5.2 LTS recommended) Vulkan 1.3 with VK_KHR_acceleration_structure plus ray-tracing pipeline or ray query OS Linux · Windows · macOS

Shipping, constantly.

October 2026

Beta 1.0.2

  • DLSS Ray ReconstructionThe viewport upscale toggle now drives DLSS-RR on RTX GPUs, with opt-in DLSS for F12 stills as well.
  • Polarization from the first bounceCamera paths now carry Stokes Q/U from dielectric Fresnel, so reflections polarize physically.
  • Apple Silicon scene editsAcceleration-structure updates on MoltenVK now apply correctly when you move objects.
  • Windows DLSS loaderNative NGX discovery through the installed NVIDIA driver.

Built to respect artists.

Perpetual licenseBuy it once and own it, with a year of updates included.
One license per machineUpgrading your GPU never counts as a new machine, and you can move a license yourself.
Free render nodes for indiesIndie licenses render on as many headless machines as you like. Studios license each render node.
Never mid-renderLicensing gates installs and updates. It never stops a render.

Render light the way physics does.

Beta seats are open to artists and studios. Tell us what you render and which GPU you use.

You're on the list. We'll be in touch.