Four months after the last major update (4.0) and one six weeks into the beta, Blender Foundation has finally released Blender 4.1. As we already knew, in this update support has been added for AMD Ryzen APUs based on RDNA3 and performance has been improved when using the popular 3D modeling software, among other things, under Linux, around 5% faster when rendering projects and export them to a final file.
Also new for Linux users, or should I say Unix, since it is also used on BSD, is that Blender 4.1 on Wayland now supports input method editors. What you have below is a summarized list with some new arrivals that have come along with this version.
Highlights of Blender 4.1
- Open Image Denoise acceleration for NVIDIA, Intel and Apple Silicon GPUs.
- Rendering on Linux CPU is 5% faster than previous versions.
- AMD GPU rendering support for RDNA3 APUs.
- The view composer now supports Vector Blur, Defocus, Cryptomatte, and Keying Screen nodes.
- Improvements to geometry nodes.
- Blender Hydra support now handles particle system hair rendering, improved support for converting shaders to MaterialX, and large mesh export is now parallelized.
To know more details, you can read the published article by my colleague Darkcrizt last February, and also visit the official notes for this release. Blender 4.1 was announced on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 26, and its tarball can now be downloaded from the next button. Your snap package is already updated, and in the next few hours they should do the same with their flatpak version. Later it will reach the official repositories of some Linux distributions. The next version will be Blender 4.2 and should arrive in no less than three months.