Blender 4.4 is out today as the newest version of this incredible, open-source 3D modeling software.
Blender 4.4 delivers on another half-year worth of improvements to this leading open-source and cross-platform 3D modeling solution.
Some of the key Blender 4.4 highlights include:
– The experimental Vulkan back-end has received a big update with greater performance, stability, and compatibility. Vulkan is still considered experimental in Blender 4.4 but is showing much better performance compared to using OpenGL. Blender’s Vulkan back-end aims for production readiness later in 2025.
– Support for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 (Blackwell) and AMD Radeon RX 9000 (RDNA4) series graphics cards for GPU-based rendering.
– AMD HIP RT support is no longer considered experimental and will be enabled by default in the next Blender release. But HIP RT on RDNA1 GPUs is no longer available.
– AMD ROCm/HIP support on Linux now requires at least ROCm 6.0. The AMD Windows driver requirements were also increased.
– The OptiX denoiser was updated to improve denoising quality.
– Blender’s 3D Viewport overlays have been rewritten for better consistency and extendability.
– The CPU compositor for Blender has been rewritten for future development and can allow for much better performance compared to the old compositor.
– Blender videos can now be rendered using the H.265 (HEVC) video codec.
– For the geometry nodes code porting the triangulate node from BMesh to Mesh has yielded a 300~100x performance improvement.
– The Pose Library has been updated to allow for a smoother workflow when working with other Pose assets.
– Integer sockets are now supported in the compositor.
– Continued improvements around glTF support.
– A new brush type, the “Plane brush” has been added.
– Various UI improvements.
More details on all of the many Blender 4.4 changes via the release notes. Blender 4.4 downloads from Blender.org. Updated Blender benchmarks soon for both CPUs and GPUs.
