At the end of July, the Blender Foundation He launched the last major update of the 3D image editing, modeling, etc. software that they develop. It was v2.80 of the same one that, although it did not change the first number, it did include many outstanding novelties. Today, almost four months later, they have launched Blender 2.81, which is the first maintenance release in this series. It does not include features as prominent as the version released this summer, but it does include some improvements.
Among the most prominent changes that come with Blender 2.81 we have un NVIDIA OptiX backend for use on RTX / Turing GPUs for faster rendering performance than CUDA / OpenCL backends, support for Intel Open Image Denoise, adaptive subdivision support for Cycles, new Sculpt tools, outliner enhancements, and better brush tools .
Blender 2.81 is the first maintenance release in this series
The Blender Foundation says they have included over a thousand fixes in this release:
The highly anticipated Blender 2.80 milestone update is here! With over a thousand fixes and several major updates planned for the 2.8 series. Most notable is the overhaul of sculpting tools, support for NVIDIA RTX ray tracing in Cycles, Intel Open Image denoising, a better profile, a new file browser, and much more..
We remember that Blender 2.80 already came with notable changes, among which we had changes in the interface that make the software more intuitive, improvements in the selection that can now be used on touch screens or with stylus, new templates or a new rendering engine that they called Eevee and that it is based on the physical representation that has the particularity of managing both the visualization of the scene in the editor and the representation of the scene for the final product.
You have all the information about Blender 2.81 in this link from its official website.