Blender 4.0 Released For This Incredible Open-Source 3D Modeling Software

After a one week delay, Blender 4.0 is now available as the latest major update to this leading open-source and cross platform 3D modeling software.

With Blender 4.0, Cycles now supports light and shadow linking. Cycles also now supports path guiding on glossy surfaces and other improvements. Cycles also now supports Apple's Metal API for hardware ray-tracing with MetalRT. Cycles also now features performance improvements to geometry uploads that can be up to a 1.76x performance improvement for a large mesh. AMD RDNA2 and RDNA3 APU support is also now available for the HIP back-end in Blender 4.0.

Blender 4.0 also has a variety of animation and rigging enhancements. The default UI font has been changed to Inter and there are also various other user interface enhancements with Blender 4.0. There is also more glTF 2.0 functionality is in place, OpenGL 4.3 is now a minimum requirement on Linux and macOS and there are various other improvements throughout for this open-source industry-supported 3D modeling and animation software.

See the Blender 4.0 release notes for more details. Blender 4.0 is up on the mirrors for Linux, macOS, and Windows. I'll be running some Blender 4.0 benchmarks shortly on Phoronix.