Blender version 3.6 has been released, and it promises boosted performance for most users

Blender version 3.6 is now available, adding some major performance updates to the application and hardware accelerated ray tracing support for AMD and Intel GPUs

Blender 3.6 has been released, updating the open-source 3D computer graphics software with new features, improved performance, and support for hardware accelerated ray tracing across a broader number of graphics cards. 

With Blender 3.6, hardware accelerated ray tracing is now available for users of Intel and AMD graphics cards. In Blender 3.5, hardware accelerated ray tracing was only supported on systems with Nvidia graphics cards, giving Nvidia based systems a huge performance advantage when compared to PCs with alternative graphics cards. Sadly, hardware accelerated ray tracing is not available for AMS users on Linux yet, but this should change with future updates to Blender. 

Alongside a bunch of UI changes and other improvements, Blender 3.6 includes several changes that can deliver dramatic performance improvements. Overall, the application is more multi-threaded, increasing Blender’s performance on systems with high CPU core counts, the app now uses 35% memory with large geometries, and mesh conversions are up to 75% faster with multiple UV maps. Extracting UV map data is also now 3x faster than before, and users can see up to 44% better performance in meshes with custom split normal data. With Blender’s 3.6 update, the app now runs a lot faster than before, especially for users with AMD or Intel GPUs that support hardware accelerated ray tracing.

Blender 3.6 is now available to download, and we plan to benchmark the new update soon to analyse its performance impact on AMD and Nvidia graphics cards.  

You can join the discussion on Blender 3.6 on the OC3D Forums.