D5 Render

D5 Render is a GPU accelerated real time rendering engine for architectural and spatial design visualization, distributed by D5 as a Windows desktop application. It is built partly on Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing, which is why it requires a ray tracing capable graphics card and Windows 10 version 1809 or later. Alongside its geometry, material, lighting and animation tools, it handles Gaussian splats both inside the desktop engine and through its browser based XR Tour.

Gaussian splatting first reached D5 users through XR Tour, a cloud workflow that takes uploaded rendered images or video and returns an interactive 3DGS reconstruction viewable in a browser. D5 Render 3.0, released in January 2026, added alpha support for importing 3DGS files in .ply format directly into a scene, so reconstructions sit beside conventional geometry, lights and cameras. D5 labels the import alpha. At 3.0, imported splats behaved as viewable spatial assets rather than editable meshes, with animation, physics and deep material interaction outside their scope.

D5 Render 3.1, released in July 2026, brings imported splats into the renderer's light transport. In ray tracing mode a splat now participates in global illumination, appears in reflections, and takes part in shadow calculations, where under 3.0 it was displayed but inert to bounced light. Treating splats as ray-traceable primitives parallels NVIDIA's 3D Gaussian Ray Tracing, though D5 has not described its implementation. D5 also reports higher frame rates in some .ply scenes, lower peak GPU usage and fewer stutters after optimizing that pipeline.

The same release rebuilt XR Tour. AI enhanced screenshots replace the earlier local rendering step, which D5 says cuts the render time for the same project to roughly a quarter, and the training service now outputs a compact .sog file. The XR Tour web editor runs on D5's own WebGPU framework and adds custom camera transitions and iframe embed code for placing tours on web pages and third party platforms.

D5 Render sells on a tiered model with a free Community plan and paid Pro and Teams subscriptions. The Community plan allows one panorama tour, one spatial tour and one interactive presentation and limits cloud space, while Pro gives 10 GB of cloud space and Teams 100 GB. D5 lists an NVIDIA GTX 1060, Intel Arc 3 or AMD RX 6400 as the minimum graphics card, an RTX 3060 as recommended and an RTX 3090 as optimal, with 32 GB of system RAM recommended. Pro and Teams plans add XR Tour, Cesium integration and a city generator for site context.