Blender 4.5 is now officially available today as the newest feature release and one that is a Long Term Support (LTS) for this popular, cross-platform 3D modeling software.
Blender 4.5 LTS is a big release ahead of Blender 5.0 to succeed it. Blender 4.5 features much better Vulkan support and a plethora of other enhancements:
– Blender’s Vulkan back-end is now considered to be on-par with OpenGL. The Vulkan code now has support for OpenXR, Subdivision, USD/Hydra, and other features. The performance of using the Vulkan back-end is also better than with prior releases. OpenGL is still used by default for Blender 4.5 but basically the Vulkan path should be production-ready when using up-to-date Windows or Linux drivers.
– A few Wayland and X11 platform enhancements for Linux users.
– Vector Math, Vector Rotate, Vector Mix, Value Mix, Clamp, Float Curve, and Blackbody nodes were added to Blender 4.5.
– Dependency graph building with Blender 4.5 is as much as 18% faster when there are many data blocks thanks to this core Blender improvement.
– Improvements to the experimental Adaptive Subdivison support, including multi-threading for better performance.
– Texture loading performance has been improved with Eevee as well as bettering the start-up performance. Shader compilation is also now multi-threaded by default.
– The Blender 4.5 physics code has improved liquid simulation performance up to 1.25~1.5x faster.
– Blender 4.5 now supports writing ProRes codec videos, importing multiple SVG files at once, USD file import improvements, and various other file handling import/export improvements.
– Big Endian support is deprecated and will be removed in Blender 5.0.
– macOS on Intel hardware support is now deprecated. Due to ongoing high maintenance costs dealing with graphics related issues on Intel powered Macs with either Intel or AMD GPU Macs, Blender 4.5 is the last release with official Intel macOS builds.
More details on the big Blender 4.5 LTS release and its many changes via the Blender 4.5 release notes.
Blender 4.5 for all major platforms can be downloaded at Blender.org for this exceptional free software. Fresh Blender benchmarks for CPUs and GPUs of the Blender 4.5 release coming up soon.
