With this week’s release of Blender 5.1 I have begun benchmarking it on different CPUs and GPUs. In this article is an initial look at the positive impact Blender 5.1 is having on CPU-based rendering performance on Linux.
Blender 5.1 release notes mention the CPU rendering performance on Windows is improved by 5~20%. There wasn’t any Linux mention specifically but with Blender 5.1 I am finding up to a few percent faster render speeds on Linux compared to Blender 5.0. The Cycles engine in Blender 5.1 is said to improve GPU rendering performance by 5~10%, but in my tests with the NVIDIA CUDA and OptiX back-ends I didn’t see that overall and for a few scenes was slower with Blender 5.1 compared to Blender 5.0.
Most of my testing thus far of Blender 5.1 was done on the new System76 Thelio Mira desktop with the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Zen 5 processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card while running Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS.
With Blender 5.1 the CPU rendering performance was up to a few percent faster across the different scenes tested. With complex scenes like Barbershop this can equate to some measurable time savings if doing a lot of work with Blender. These CPU results align with what I’ve seen out of Blender 5.1 on various other CPUs tested thus far.
