Blender 3.0 Shines As A Huge Update For This Leading Open-Source 3D Modeling Software

Blender 3.0 is officially releasing today as a huge update to this open-source 3D modeling software that in recent years has become backed by numerous large hardware/software companies and has rivaled proprietary software for its capabilities.

After a delay to allow more time for polishing it up, Blender 3.0 is officially shipping today. The Blender 3.0 release announcement hasn't hit the wire yet but those eager to try out this big open-source software release can find the release binaries via their download page.

Blender 3.0 introduces the big "Cycles X" upgrade to its Cycles rendering engine. With the Blender 3.0 release there is NVIDIA CUDA/OptiX support as well as initial AMD HIP acceleration but only for Windows. The AMD HIP support for Linux unfortunately is not coming until Blender 3.1. Cycles X offers performance improvements, new features, and much more. In the process, OpenCL support was dropped with Blender 3.0.

Blender 3.0 also features a plethora of animation improvements, faster opening of large Blend files, Zstd compression of Blend files, better Eevee performance, grease pencil improvements, improvements around VR controller input, and a ton of other features.

See the Blender 3.0 release notes for the lengthy list of all the changes that were made possible in large part by all the financial backing now to accelerate Blender development. Among the biggest backers to Blender are NVIDIA, AMD, Unity, Epic Games, Facebook / Meta, and Amazon AWS along with Adobe, Intel, Microsoft, and others also contributing significantly to the Blender Development Fund.

I'll have out Blender 3.0 CPU and NVIDIA GPU benchmarks in the coming days on Phoronix.