The release candidate of the Blender 4.5 3D modeling software is now available for testing. There are many great improvements to find with Blender 4.5 and this new version is all the more important in being the next Long Term Support (LTS) release for this popular cross-platform 3D modeling software.
Blender 4.5 is the next LTS release and it’s coming packed with numerous exciting enhancements, including better Vulkan support and various performance optimizations. Some of the Blender 4.5 change/feature highlights include:
– 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 c ode 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 changes coming with Blender 4.5 via the in-progress release notes.
If all goes well Blender 4.5 LTS will be out next week. Succeeding the Blender 4.5 LTS series will be Blender 5.0. Those wanting to try out the Blender 4.5 release candidate today can find the Linux / macOS / Windows binaries at builder.blender.org.
