MDL SDK 2026.0.2 (391700.2276): 24 Aug 2026

ABI compatible with the MDL SDK 2026.0.2 (391700.2276) binary release
(see https://developer.nvidia.com/mdl-sdk)

Added and Changed Features

• General

  • The recommended vcpkg version has been updated to git ID 9d7f79f. This update includes
    Boost 1.91.0 and OpenImageIO 3.1.14.0, and various security fixes in their dependencies.
  • The recommended MaterialX version has been updated to 1.39.5.
  • The recommended Doxygen version has been updated to 1.17.0.
  • The compiler option -mtls-dialect=trad has been added on linux-aarch64 to avoid a
    problem with std::call_once on this platform.
  • The native texture runtime has been changed to perform gamma correction before
    filtering.
  • The OpenImageIO plugin has been configured to clean up its string pool at shutdown. This
    avoids false positives when memory checkers like valgrind are used.
  • The OpenImageIO plugin has been configured to ignore errors in corrupt IPTC metadata.
  • The MDL archiver now refuses to extract files that are stored above the root of an MDL
    archive. This guards against manipulated MDL archives that could otherwise be used to
    overwrite arbitrary files with the permissions of the user extracting the archive.

• MDL Distiller and Baker

  • Added new MDL Distiller target ovrtx, supporting the RTX renderer in NVIDIA Omniverse.
  • Improved distilling of OmniPBR materials with sheen and fractional metalness.
  • Added a GPU baker based on CUDA. Previously, the source release supported CPU baking
    only. The baker resources BAKE_ON_GPU and BAKE_ON_GPU_WITH_CPU_FALLBACK are now
    supported, including tiled and animated textures.
  • The new CMake option MDL_ENABLE_GPU_BAKER controls whether the GPU baker is built. It
    is enabled by default, except on macOS. When disabled, the build has no CUDA dependency
    and BAKE_ON_GPU is not available.
  • The texture runtime is now shared with the CUDA-based SDK examples.

• MDL SDK examples

  • Example baking:
    • New example that shows how to bake material sub-expressions to textures or constants
      without distilling.
  • Example df_native:
    • Added support for 3D textures to native custom texture runtime.
  • Example entity_resolver:
    • New example that demonstrates how to implement a custom entity resolver.
  • Example df_cuda:
    • Added support for spectral rendering.
  • Example df_vulkan:
    • Added support for measured BSDFs.
    • Added options for UV flip, scale, offset, repeat, and clamp.
  • Example code_gen:
    • All metadata is now dumped to the output file when requested.
  • Example DXR:
    • Added support for the geometry.displacement material sub-expression.
    • Renamed the option --uv_saturate to --uv_clamp to match MDL terminology.

• MDL Core examples

  • Example df_cuda:
    • Added support for spectral rendering.
    • Added support for measured BSDFs in custom texture runtime.
  • Example df_vulkan:
    • Added support for measured BSDFs.

Fixed Bugs

• General

  • Fixed enumeration of resources that appear inside arrays.
  • Fixed a rare aliasing bug when individual tiles and/or frames of a uvtile set and/or
    animated texture where also loaded individually.
  • Fixed various bugs related to parsing of DDS files.

• MDL Compiler and Backends

  • Fixed handling of weak-relative resource paths with a custom entity resolver. Updated
    documentation for required error messages.
  • Fixed generation of nested ?: operators in target languages.
  • Fixed an optimization that removed the built-in textures when multiscatter_tint is
    zero for the spectral case.
  • Fixed the native JIT on macOS aarch64, which was broken due to the switch to ELF.

• MDL SDK examples

  • Example compilation:
    • Fixed crash with non-existing expression path.