Blender 5.1 Released With Raycast Nodes, AMD GPU Ray-Tracing By Default
Blender 5.1 is out today with many exciting improvements for this leading open-source 3D modeling software. From AMD GPU hardware ray-tracing being enabled by default at long last to more mature Vulkan support and performance, Blender 5.1 is a great release.
Blender 5.1 changes include introducing raycast nodes, improved performance of the animation system, optimized array hashing for a 20~30% speed-up, replacing jemalloc with the TBB_MALLOC_PROXY code, adapting the Blender code to C++20, EEVEE materials are now compiled faster, AVIF image file format support, JPEG-2000 multi-threading support, and more stable Vulkan support along with adding a Vulkan texture pool.
The Blender 5.1 Cycles code also delivers improved GPU rendering performance by 5~10%. The CPU rendering performance on Windows is improved by 5~20%. Also exciting with Blender 5.1 is Cycles finally enabling AMD GPU hardware ray-tracing by default through HIP-RT.
More details on the Blender 5.1 features via the release notes. Blender 5.1 can be downloaded from Blender mirrors.
Blender 5.1 changes include introducing raycast nodes, improved performance of the animation system, optimized array hashing for a 20~30% speed-up, replacing jemalloc with the TBB_MALLOC_PROXY code, adapting the Blender code to C++20, EEVEE materials are now compiled faster, AVIF image file format support, JPEG-2000 multi-threading support, and more stable Vulkan support along with adding a Vulkan texture pool.
The Blender 5.1 Cycles code also delivers improved GPU rendering performance by 5~10%. The CPU rendering performance on Windows is improved by 5~20%. Also exciting with Blender 5.1 is Cycles finally enabling AMD GPU hardware ray-tracing by default through HIP-RT.
More details on the Blender 5.1 features via the release notes. Blender 5.1 can be downloaded from Blender mirrors.