I, who have used all kinds of operating systems, have very much in my memory what happened when Apple went from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I didn't see his presentation, but I recently read that in that Keynote it was said that it was a version without new functions, not of importance. They had focused on improving performance, and it showed, boy did it show. If I am mentioning this, it is because there are times when it is worth stopping a bit and improving what already exists, and that is mainly what they have done in Blender 3.1.
As we read in the release note, and in the following video, Blender 3.1 is such a release, an update that has focused on improving performance. Of course, unlike Apple with its Snow Leopard, this update of the famous 3D modeler has included new features. They are few, but they can become important precisely for apple computers, since support for Apple's M1 has been improved.
Other new features of Blender 3.1
- Metal GPU support provided by Apple for computers with M1 processors and AMD graphics cards.
- GPU acceleration for the subdivision modifier.
- Faster mesh editing.
- Asset browser indexing.
- Image editor support for large images.
- Improved export speed to .obj and .fbx.
- Improvements to multithreading, node tree evaluation, and reduced memory usage on geometry nodes.
Blender 3.1, which has arrived about three months after the earlier version, has been released a few hours ago, and can now be downloaded since official website o your snap pack. In the next few hours it will appear in the official repositories of some Linux distributions, and at some point it will also appear on Flathub.