Blender 5.2 LTS, released in July 2026, still divides the work the same way it always has. Cycles path-traces on the processor, on the graphics card, or on both together. EEVEE renders through the viewport and leans on the GPU whatever else you do. Which of those two you spend your day inside decides where the money should go.

Cycles reaches the GPU through OptiX on NVIDIA cards, HIP with HIP-RT on AMD, oneAPI on Intel Arc and Metal on Apple silicon. OptiX asks for a driver from the 535 branch or newer and a card of compute capability 5.0 or above, which every current RTX board clears comfortably. From there the number that decides a render is the frame buffer, not the core count: when a scene will not fit, Cycles either spills into system memory across PCIe and crawls, or the render stops.