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.
