Blender 2.81 In Next Phase Of Development With NVIDIA RTX Optix, Intel Open Image Denoise

The Blender 2.81 release cycle has entered its "bcon2" development phase of development with the focus shifting to bug fixing and stabilizing new features with now being past the initial window of merging in the big ticket items.

This phase of development for the initial bug fixing will last about one month followed by "bcon3" where the release branch happens and the next (Blender 2.82) release cycle kicks off for feature merging.

While Blender 2.81's new feature list is subject to change still if any features need to be disabled/reverted over not being baked enough, it's an impressive update following the massive Blender 2.80 release. Blender 2.81 is bringing a NVIDIA RTX Optix back-end that was contributed by NVIDIA and is showing the potential for Turing GPUs to deliver much faster render performance compared to the conventional CUDA (or OpenCL) back-end. Blender 2.81 also integrates Intel's Open Image Denoise, Cycles now supports adaptive subdivision, new sculpt tools, outliner improvements, grease pencil improvements, and a ton of other improvements.

More details on Blender 2.81 at this stage via code.blender.org. There are also the in-progress 2.81 release notes for this next version of Blender that should debut before year's end.