VkSplatting 2026.2 Replaces Phong With GGX PBR Materials and Adds Path Traced Lighting

NVIDIA's vk_gaussian_splatting has shipped its 2026.2.0 release, replacing the renderer's Phong shading with GGX metallic roughness PBR materials and adding indirect lighting for splat sets. The June 4 release is the largest update to the open source Vulkan playground since 2026.1 and it moves the testbed toward a physically based hybrid renderer.

The lighting stack is new end to end. The release adds image based lighting from environment maps, a physical sky model, and next event estimation plus BRDF path tracing combined through multiple importance sampling, with tone mapping and auto exposure brought over from nvpro_core2. Splats can now sit alongside traditional geometry, as the 2026.2.0 loads glTF and GLB meshes with full PBR texture sets and emissive materials, flattening scene graphs on import.

The ray tracing path gets equally specific upgrades. Billboard ray tracing now runs through intersection shaders with selectable TLAS bounding modes, and a new sphere primitive mode uses the VK_NV_ray_tracing_linear_swept_spheres extension. A shared TLAS for per particle RTX reduces VRAM use and acceleration structure rebuilds. DLSS integration picks up motion vectors for both meshes and splat sets, hardware depth, and a firefly clamp.

Around the renderer, the release reworks the UI into Denoising, Rasterization, and Raytracing tabs, adds project save and save-as, ships a samples folder with an asset download build script, and adds a billboard benchmark suite plus a headless mode with an expanded command line for automated testing.

The project remains a sample rather than a product, but the 2026.1 brought 3DGUT support, and 2026.2 now demonstrates splats participating in a physically based light transport loop next to textured meshes.

It remains accessible through GitHub here.