Initially, Foundry announced Mari 7.0 alongside Nuke 15.0 and Katana 7.0 – the latest versions of their software for compositing and lighting and look development, respectively. All three releases support common VFX industry standards, updating the three applications to the CY2023 specification for the VFX Reference Platform and USD 23.05, as well as transitioning to Rocky Linux as a successor to CentOS.

The main change in Mari 7.0 is The Bakery - a new system for baking texture maps based on geometry, such as curvature, thickness, displacement, and occlusion maps. It supports batch baking of maps with multiple rendering settings, as well as baking animated geometry.
Earlier this year, Foundry described the new Vulkan-based architecture as more performant than Mari's previous architecture, which was based on technology used in Modo, software for 3D modeling and rendering. This change aims to eliminate the need for users to switch to third-party applications like Adobe's Substance 3D for texture baking. Baking is GPU-accelerated on NVIDIA RTX and AMD 6000 Series GPUs and later versions.

The update also introduces two new procedural texturing nodes, Bubbles and Camouflage, to add basic procedural textures to 3D models, and comes with an additional 60 grunge maps.
Furthermore, the Autodesk Standard Surface and VRayMTL shader models have been updated to improve visual consistency between the viewport and final renders in Arnold and V-Ray.
Among other changes is the revamped automatic backup system, aimed at simplifying archive restoration compared to the existing automatic saving system and reducing the archive size on the disk.

The node graph in Mari has undergone several workflow improvements, including support for fuzzy search, the ability to add nodes to favorites, and support for node disabling by disconnecting them, similar to Houdini, or by shaking the node, akin to Nuke.
The USD importer introduced in Mari 5.0 has been revamped, offering improved user convenience and displaying the USD hierarchy more clearly.
Mari 7.0 is compatible with Windows 10 and higher, as well as Rocky Linux/RHEL 9.

Mari 7.0 is available only through subscription. The individual subscription costs $86 per month or $689 annually. The team subscription costs $1119 annually. For studios, Foundry has introduced cloud-based team licensing for Mari, along with the existing RLM licensing.