Open CL support was dropped due to driver bugs and the stalled OpenCL standard, but other hardware vendors have immediately pitched in development time to bring back GPU rendering support with their APIs, including AMDs HIP which just made it for the 3.0 release, with Apple following suit with their Metal framework, expected to be ready for the next release Thanks to the re-write, rendering in cycles is 2 to 8 times faster in real-world scenes out of the box on GPU! Kernel compilation times have been massively reduced for Optix, which now also supports hardware ray-tracing for baking. The Cycles X project is one of the crowning achievements of Blender 3.0: The major re-write of the 11-year-old path tracing production renderer has made its way to its release, and the results are breathtaking. Here is a look at the five key features (and then some) that stood out to us in this newest release, but it's highly recommended to check out the release notes and the release overview for a full picture of all the awesome new features available now at our fingertips! 1.

Blender 3.0 was afforded 3 more months of development time to mitigate covid-induced restrictions and to 'stick the landing' of the 3.0 milestone, and boy did the Blender Developers make use of this extra time. This momentous release was released a couple of weeks after Blender's most ambitious Open Movie to date, Sprite Fright, during the production of which this release cut its teeth. Today, 3December 2021, Blender Foundation announces the release of Blender 3.0, to mark the beginning of a new era for open source 2D/3D content creation. Blender dons this new digit as a token of achievement, more powerful mature and adopted than ever, carried on the shoulders of the Blender Foundation, thousands of contributors, thousands of Development Fund supporters, and millions of users worldwide. Blender 2.0 was announced at Siggraph 2000, which means that Blender's giant leap into the 3.x realm was 21 years in the making.

This is it, the end of an era, the beginning of a new one.

Blender asset browser 2.93