Blender 5.2.2 for Jetson Thor (aarch64) with CUDA Cycles + OIDN + OSL + Vulkan

An unofficial community build recipe (and optional prebuilt binary) of Blender 5.2.2 LTS for NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor (Blackwell, sm_110) with GPU rendering enabled - the things no prebuilt aarch64 Blender gives you:

• Cycles GPU (CUDA) on the Blackwell GPU - native sm_110 cubin (no first-render JIT stall) plus compute_90 PTX fallback for any sm_90+ device.
• OpenImageDenoise on both CPU and GPU/CUDA (the GPU path is the tricky one - see below).
• OSL (Open Shading Language) on CPU.
• EEVEE-Next realtime rasterizer on both the OpenGL and Vulkan backends, GPU-accelerated, working in the GUI and fully headless (Thor ships a working NVIDIA Vulkan 1.4 driver).
• HarfBuzz + FriBidi for complex-script and bidirectional (RTL) text shaping.

Update 2026-10-11 - please use release r2. The first 5.2.2 download rendered instanced objects (linked duplicates, motion-blurred objects, subsurface-scattering materials) invisible on the GPU (Cycles CUDA) - e.g. the Open Data "classroom" scene lost all its desks and chairs. Cause: a GCC 14.1/14.2 aarch64 miscompile in Cycles' BVH2 packer (Ubuntu 24.04's g++-14 is 14.2); fixed by PATCHES/0009. CPU and EEVEE renders were not affected, nor is the 4.5.13 release. verify/cycles_instancing_test.py checks any build for it. r2 also brings tuned sm_110 Cycles kernels (Open Data +30% on Thor) and jemalloc (no scene-load stalls).

Not affiliated with or endorsed by the Blender Foundation. "Blender" is their trademark; this is a modified community build, named to avoid any confusion with official releases.

Who this is for

• Tested on: Jetson AGX Thor, JetPack 7 / L4T R38.4.0, Ubuntu 24.04, aarch64, CUDA 13.0, driver 580.xx.
• Should also work (unverified): other sm_90+ CUDA-13 aarch64 hosts (the Cycles kernels include compute_90 PTX). Treat as best-effort.
• NOT supported: Jetson Orin (sm_87) or older, x86_64 (use official builds), Windows/macOS.

Older release: Blender 4.5.13 LTS for the same platform is still available under Releases (v4.5.13-thor-aarch64-cuda13) if you need it.

Option A - run the prebuilt binary (if a Release is attached)

1. Requires the target to have JetPack 7 / CUDA 13 driver (580+) installed (we do not bundle NVIDIA libraries; Cycles dlopens the system CUDA driver).
2. Download blender-5.2.2-thor-aarch64-cuda13-r2.tar.zst from Releases, verify against SHA256SUMS, extract, run ./blender.
3. Sanity-check GPU rendering with the scripts in verify/ (below).

Option B - build from source (the golden path)

Everything is in recipe/. Read recipe/00-prereqs.md first (note: Blender 5.2 requires GCC 14), then:

# 1. get + patch the source (see 00-prereqs.md for the LFS details - important!)
# GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE avoids smudging every LFS blob on checkout (a plain clone can hang);
# we then pull only the datafiles we need.
GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone --branch v5.2.2 --single-branch \
    https://github.com/blender/blender.git && cd blender
git config lfs.url https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender.git/info/lfs
git lfs pull --include="release/datafiles/**"
git am /path/to/this-repo/PATCHES/00*.patch   # 0001..0011

# 2. build
export BLENDER_SRC=$PWD
/path/to/this-repo/recipe/10-deps.sh      # dependency stack (long: LLVM/OSL/OIDN/USD/...)
/path/to/this-repo/recipe/20-blender.sh   # Blender itself, built with GCC 14 (~15-20 min)
/path/to/this-repo/recipe/25-jemalloc.sh  # link + bundle jemalloc (re-run after EVERY rebuild)
# optional: a portable tarball with build-machine paths removed (refuses to pack if any remain)
OUT_NAME=my-blender /path/to/this-repo/recipe/40-package.sh
/path/to/this-repo/recipe/30-assets.sh    # un-stub bundled brush/geometry-node assets

The build lands at $BLENDER_BUILD/bin/blender (default ~/blender-build/blender_bin/bin/blender).

Verify it actually uses the GPU (do this!)

A build that compiles is not proof a GPU feature works - the OIDN GPU path in particular fails silently to CPU if built wrong. Runtime proofs in verify/:

• blender -b -P verify/cycles_gpu_test.py - CUDA device = 'NVIDIA Thor', non-black denoised render. First render is ~0.7s with the native sm_110 cubin (was ~371s with PTX-JIT only).
• OIDN_VERBOSE=2 blender -b -P verify/cycles_oidn_gpu_test.py - OIDN banner must say Type: CUDA / Arch: SM 11.0.
• verify/oidn_cuda_test.c - standalone OIDN C-API GPU-device test (compile + run against libOpenImageDenoise).
• blender -b -P verify/cycles_osl_test.py - OSL shading system active; render tracks the OSL source.
• blender --gpu-backend opengl -b -P verify/eevee_headless_test.py - headless EEVEE renders a non-black PNG.
• blender --gpu-backend vulkan -b -P verify/eevee_headless_test.py - same, on the Vulkan backend.
• blender -b --factory-startup -P verify/cycles_instancing_test.py - linked duplicates, motion blur and SSS objects render on the GPU exactly as on the CPU (RESULT: OK). The first 5.2.2 build fails this.
• g++-14 -O2 -o check verify/gcc_slp_union_check.cpp && ./check - does YOUR compiler have the GCC 14.1/14.2 aarch64 bug behind it? Prints OK or FAIL: .z/.w lost (no Blender needed).

What's different from stock, and why

See CHANGES-vs-upstream.md for a per-patch explanation. Short version: small .cmake fixes for aarch64/CUDA-13 breakages plus two build-graph fixes upstream 5.2 is missing. The two that matter most are CPU-OSL (disabling the broken OptiX shadeops path on ARM) and GPU-OIDN via OIDN_DEVICE_CUDA_API=RuntimeStatic with sm_110 arch fixups (dodging a silent __cudaLaunchKernel dlopen failure). Vulkan / HarfBuzz / FriBidi are configure flags in recipe/20-blender.sh, not source patches. Since r2: 0009 fixes instanced objects vanishing on the GPU (GCC 14.1/14.2 aarch64 miscompile), 0010/0011 tune the sm_110 Cycles kernels' launch bounds, and recipe/25-jemalloc.sh swaps oneTBB's malloc proxy for jemalloc.

Licensing

• Blender is GPL (GPLv2-or-later; GPLv3 for parts). The corresponding source for any binary here is upstream tag v5.2.2 plus the patches in PATCHES/ - both are provided.
• Bundled dependencies keep their own licenses; see licenses/.
• Our own files in this repo (recipe scripts, docs, verify helpers) are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 - see LICENSE.