Choosing a renderer
Pick which engine turns your 3D scene into pixels, per viewport, from the viewport toolbar.
Every viewport draws your scene through a renderer. DNA ships one — a fast, real-time GPU renderer — and it does everything described across these docs: lit meshes, shadows, reflections, volumes, splats, post effects, and the 2D/3D composite. You don't have to choose anything to get started; it's already selected.
The renderer dropdown lives in the viewport toolbar. It's there because DNA is built so renderers can be swapped, and so each viewport can use a different one.
The built-in GPU renderer
This is the only renderer that ships today, and it's the one every page here assumes. It's a real-time rasterizer with a hybrid ray-tracing layer on top, so you get interactive feedback while still picking up ray-traced shadows, ambient occlusion, and reflections where you turn them on.
What it covers:
Image-based lighting and environments (Environment & image-based lighting)
Volumes, Gaussian splats, and analytic shapes
Screen-space and post effects (Post effects)
The full 2D-over-3D composite (Layers & compositing)
It runs the same on macOS, Windows, and in the Web Player, so what you see while building is what you get on export.
Heavy ray-traced effects (reflections, ambient occlusion) are the first thing to dial back if a scene gets sluggish. The renderer can drop them automatically when a frame runs over budget — see Making it faster.
Per-viewport choice
The dropdown is per viewport, not global. If you've got two viewports open, each remembers its own renderer. That matters more once external renderers arrive — you could keep one viewport on the fast built-in renderer for interaction and another on a slower, higher-quality engine for a final look.
For now, every viewport uses the built-in renderer, so the choice is effectively made for you.
External renderers are a future extension point
DNA's renderer is pluggable by design. The intent is that third-party engines — path tracers, stylised/NPR renderers, and similar — can register themselves and show up in this same dropdown, including for plugins.
No external or third-party renderers ship today. Path tracers, Eevee/Cycles-style engines, and other alternative backends are a planned extension point, not a current feature. Until they arrive, the dropdown only offers the built-in GPU renderer.
When external renderers do land, expect them to advertise their own capabilities (whether they support volumes, splats, progressive refinement, and so on) and expose their own settings — so the controls in the dropdown will depend on which renderer you pick.