Blender 3.1 uses Metal API: free 3D graphics suite becomes faster and more reliable

The powerful open source 3D graphics suite mixers, which is also offered as a download directly on ComputerBase and provides publishers with a loyal service, especially in CPU benchmarks, should become even faster and more reliable with the update to version 3.1. 3D API is also supported metal by Apple

Support for Apple’s 3D Metal API

Blender 3.1 includes numerous general performance improvements, such as accelerated geometry nodes, optimized utilization of many CPU cores through multi-threading, and more efficient memory usage, and now also offers an Apple-designed metal GPU backend for SoC from M1 to M1 Ultra.

The official release notes Also list the following innovations and optimizations as highlights of Blender 3.1:

• The new Point Cloud object can be directly rendered with Cycles to create sand, water splashes, particles, or even motion graphics.
  • Much more memory efficient.
  • Faster render times.
  • Point Information node.
  • Point clouds can be generated with Geometry Nodes or imported from other software.

• Ray tracing accuracy
• Polynomial model of fisheye lens
• New “adjacent faces” for baking
• Combine OpenEXR renders with adaptive sampling
• OptiX Temporary Denois

• Blender 3.1 takes Geometry Nodes performance to the next level, many nodes are now multi-threaded and use less memory.
• Do more with less.

Highlights of Blender 3.1

The wide range of tools has been expanded to allow for better modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering, animation, and content post-processing. Despite its ever-increasing scope of services, it remains under the free license GNU GPL relatively small distributed rendering tool.

In the categories of fastest processor and fastest graphics card in Blender, the HEDT Threadripper 3990X CPU (test) and GeForce RTX 3090 (test) currently lead the field. However, these could soon face competition from the Apple M1 Ultra.

Download at Computer Base

As usual, Blender 3.1 can be downloaded directly below this post from the ComputerBase download area for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. The Blender Foundation also already offers the first alpha of Blender 3.2 (ZIP) for particularly experienced users and developers.

Numerous movies (“Open Projects”) have been created entirely in Blender, examples are provided by the project website. For beginners, it is recommended that you first familiarize yourself with the Blender user interface and conventions.

Blender benchmark for CPU/GPU tests

If you want to know how much performance your CPU or GPU achieves in Blender, you can easily find out with the Blender benchmark using various project files. The download is also linked.