Godot 4.7 ships: HDR output, AreaLight3D, a new Asset Store, and WebGPU export
Godot 4.7 is out. The stable build landed on June 19, a week after RC2 cleaned up the last regressions, and right on the schedule the quiet release candidates pointed to. The team is calling it the "Director's Cut," and the headline is the same one we flagged at beta: more than 1,265 fixes from 309 contributors merged since 4.6 stable, with two rendering features and a rebuilt store doing most of the heavy lifting.
A rundown of what's new in the Godot 4.7 stable release
HDR output, finally on the panel
Godot has rendered internally in HDR for years, then tonemapped everything down to 8-bit SDR at the final output stage. 4.7 closes that gap. The engine now drives HDR displays directly on Windows, macOS, Linux via Wayland, iOS, and visionOS, for both 2D and 3D. Bloom, emissive surfaces, and wide-luminance scenes land on the monitor the way the renderer always intended, instead of getting crushed back to standard range at the last step.
The other rendering addition is the new AreaLight3D node, a rectangular light source with correct soft shadowing and distance falloff. Before this, you faked a ceiling panel or a window by scattering point lights and tuning attenuation until it looked passable. Now it's one node with a width and a height. Interior lighting setups that used to eat an afternoon take a minute.
A rebuilt Asset Store
The old Asset Library got replaced with a new Asset Store. It's not just a rename. Browsing is faster, previews are zoomable, and the whole thing runs on a background thread so loading assets doesn't freeze the editor while you work. For an engine whose ecosystem leans heavily on community add-ons, the store being pleasant to use is more than cosmetic.
The release rounds out with inline shader previews for editing materials in real time, transformable Control nodes for UI animation, a DrawableTexture2D for drawing straight into a texture, a MeshLibrary editor, and a stable Godot Android Build Environment with full Gradle support for building and publishing Android and XR projects. On the input side, 4.7 adds a built-in virtual joystick, gyro aiming, and accelerometer support, which matters for anyone shipping to phones.
The line item we watch: WebGPU export
C# hot-reload by default is a real quality-of-life win, but the feature we track most closely is WebGPU web export, shipping behind a flag. Godot has had solid WebGL2 web export for years. WebGPU is where compute shaders, better draw-call batching, and modern pipelines live. Having it in a stable build, even flagged, means the engine's web target stops being a generation behind its native one.
That gap closing is the entire reason WebGPU mattered, something we wrote about back in January. With WebGPU now baseline in every major browser, an engine shipping a real WebGPU path is the supply side catching up to the platform.
For Cinevva, where games run instantly in a browser tab with no install, more engines targeting WebGPU is direct upside. It means more games that look good in a tab without a download, which is the bet the whole platform is built on.
Should you upgrade
If you're on 4.6 and in active development, the migration is the usual one: open in 4.7, clear the deprecated API warnings, run your test scenes. The API stability promise tightened around 4.5 and has held, so compatibility breaks are rare. The RC cycle being as quiet as it was is the signal that this is a safe upgrade, not a risky one.
If you ship on Android or XR, the stable GABE release alone is worth the move. If you build for the browser, flip on the WebGPU export flag in a test branch and see how your project runs. That's where the next few years of web game performance are headed.