Blender 4.2 LTS Beta Brings Open Image Denoise On AMD GPUs, GPU Compositing

The beta process has begun for the Blender 4.2 open-source 3D modeling software. Making Blender 4.2 all the more significant is that it's a Long Term Support (LTS) release for this widely-used program by 3D artists across platforms.

Blender 4.2 has entered its beta period that also makes it now into feature freeze. It's bug fixing only now while the Blender 4.2 release candidate will be out in early July. The hope is to have Blender 4.2 LTS released on 16 July.

There are many changes to find with Blender 4.2 including:

- Compositing for fine renders can now be GPU accelerated! The option is available via settings and whether using CPU or GPU render compositing should yield the same results with minimal variation. The new GPU compositor option is within the "Performance" settings panel.

- The render compositor has also been rewritten for improving performance -- as much as "several times faster than before". These improvements are for the CPU-based compositor.

- Faster performance for "undo" operations thanks to implicit sharing.

- Intel GPU rendering with the Cycles engine now supports host memory fallback.

- Open Image Denoise is now GPU-accelerated on AMD GPUs on Windows and Linux.

- Improved hair rendering.

- EEVEE now uses screen-space ray-tracing for every BSDF.

- The Sample UV Surface node is now 10~20x faster on large meshes.

- Blender's text editor now has support for GLSL syntax highlighting.

- Blender's rendering code now has support for the Khronos PBR Neutral view transform.

More details on the Blender 4.2 changes can be found via the in-progress release notes. Those wanting to try out the Blender 4.2 beta builds can download them from builder.blender.org. Fresh Blender benchmarks coming up in July.