Blender 4.5’s release candidate is available for testing! Featuring many improvements and being the next Long Term Support (LTS) release.
Changes include:
- Better Vulkan support, now on par with OpenGL, with features like OpenXR, Subdivision, USD/Hydra, and improved performance.
- Default graphics backend remains OpenGL, but Vulkan should be ready for production use with updated drivers on Windows or Linux.
- Linux users see Wayland and X11 improvements.
- New nodes added: Vector Math, Vector Rotate, Vector Mix, Value Mix, Clamp, Float Curve, and Blackbody.
- Dependency graph building is up to 18% faster with better multi-threading in Adaptive Subdivision and improved texture loading performance for Eevee.
- Liquid simulation in physics code is 1.25 to 1.5 times faster.
- New features include ProRes video writing, importing multiple SVG files, and various file handling improvements.
- Big Endian support is deprecated and will be removed in Blender 5.0.
- macOS support for Intel hardware is deprecated; Blender 4.5 is the last official release for Intel-powered Macs.