Blender 3.6 Released With Intel Arc Graphics Ray-Tracing, AMD HIP RT On Windows

Blender 3.6 is out today as the latest exciting update for this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software. Exciting with Blender 3.6 is adding Intel hardware ray-tracing support when making use of Arc Graphics. AMD graphics cards on Windows can also enjoy HIP ray-tracing but sadly isn't supported yet for Linux.

Blender 3.6 adds support for Intel hardware ray-tracing for Arc Graphics and Data Center GPus via use of the Embree 4 library. Blender developers have found nice speed-ups with Intel's ray-tracing path with Embree and oneAPI. This support works on both Windows and Linux.

Over on the AMD side, there is experimental AMD Radeon hardware ray-tracing at long last! This HIP RT support though is sadly limited to Windows. The release notes mention explicitly: "No Linux support, as HIP RT is Windows only still." This has been tested on Windows with AMD Radeon RX 6000 and RX 7000 series GPus as well as the Radeon PRO W6000/W7000 series.

Blender 3.6 also makes light tree processing faster and less memory intensive. Loading large geometries with Cycles is also now much faster. The Blender 3.6 update also brings animation improvements, viewport compositor enhancements, geometry nodes now has support for simulations, and Wayland fractional scaling support.

More details on the many exciting changes with Blender 3.6 via the Blender release notes. Downloads are up at Blender.org. I'll be running some fresh Linux benchmarks of Blender 3.6 shortly on Phoronix.