IMPROVEMENT, FAST Neural Lights AND 1.0 UPDATE and Shadow Catcher (same box as for cycles)
Lights galore, interactive hw lights (up to 256!):
Watch the video!
Blender-Nuru 5.1.1-1.0 — hardware ray tracing for Eevee, now on Windows, macOS, and Linux
Blender-Nuru is our open-source Blender 5.1 fork that adds a hardware ray tracing method to Eevee. You choose which effects are traced — global illumination, shadows, reflections, refractions — and keep Eevee’s real-time interactivity. It’s a hybrid renderer built for fast viewport work and stable animation frames, not a Cycles replacement.
With this release, all three platforms are covered: Windows, MacOS and Linux
Everything in one place: Release page
Highlights:
- Selective hardware ray tracing in Eevee: enable only what you need — GI, shadows, reflections, refractions — per scene
- True materials in reflections and refractions: image textures, UV maps, and mixed shader setups stay intact in mirrors and glass
- Zero-copy GPU denoising on Windows and Linux: the denoiser shares its buffers directly with the renderer, so denoised samples run at full speed; Windows additionally offers an OptiX denoiser option
- Volumetrics in viewport and final renders, including lit fog and sun shafts through windows
- Thin Glass material: window panes pass light at full strength instead of darkening sun-lit rooms
- A trace Resolution control (100/75/50/25%) that applies to every traced effect — keeps 4K work interactive
- Full Cycles included with precompiled CUDA and OptiX GPU kernels (Windows and Linux)
- Documentation bundled in every package, with per-platform pages and a practical Dos And Don’ts guide
Requirements: Windows 10/11 or 64-bit Linux with an NVIDIA RTX GPU (RTX 20 series or newer; Linux needs the 595-series or newer proprietary driver), or macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon M3 or newer (M1/M2 lack the required hardware RT support).
Getting started: install, then in Blender go to Render Properties → Eevee → enable Raytracing → set Method to Nuru Raytracing, and pick your effects in Quick Settings.
Repo, downloads, releases, source, and docs :
- Project home: https://github.com/kondoodigital/blender-nuru — README with download links, docs under
docs/ - Demo video on Vimeo
- We all need love, give us a like on github if you find the project great
The builds are unsigned: on Windows, SmartScreen needs “More info → Run anyway”; on macOS, remove quarantine with xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Blender-Nuru.app.
Feedback and bug reports are very welcome — especially across different RTX generations, Linux distros, and Apple Silicon machines
Not that we compare ourselves with Cycles 
its a different beast… but… well… we are fast, very fast!
Nuru below at 32 samples!
Cycles below at 256 samples.
We center our workflow around OSS and Akili Cloud will implement many of the OSS projects we work on:
Coming soon:
Fujo - A state of the art GPU simulator for fusioned gas and liquid simulations. Blender OSS
