Blender 5: what's new in Blender 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2 LTS

Blender 5.0 is not a redesign of the interface: its tools, menus and shortcuts are all still there. The change of number mainly marks breaks in compatibility and new technical foundations, for colour, volumes and nodes. Based on the official release notes, this guide covers what Blender 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2 LTS change, what alters the render of an existing scene, and what you need to know before opening a file in another version.

The release schedule

Blender releases a version roughly every four months, each one maintained until the next arrives. Once a year, an LTS (long-term support) version receives fixes for two years.

At the time of writing, Blender 5.3 is in beta and Blender 5.4 in development. Two LTS versions are therefore maintained in parallel: 4.5, the last of the 4 series, and 5.2.

Blender 5.0: the main new features

Colour management: working space, ACES and HDR

Each file now has a working colour space. The default remains Linear Rec.709, as before; Linear Rec.2020 and ACEScg let you use a wider gamut of colours for materials, lights and compositing, and follow an ACES workflow. This choice affects every colour in the file: the release notes advise setting it at the start of a project. Blender can convert a file from one space to another, but only approximately.

On the display side, Blender 5.0 adds the ACES 1.3 and 2.0 views, an AgX HDR view, and the Rec.2100-PQ and Rec.2100-HLG displays for preparing an HDR video. HDR display works on Windows and on Linux with Wayland, provided you choose the Vulkan backend in the preferences, and on Macs with Apple silicon. Images and videos can be saved in these HDR and wide-gamut spaces.

Cycles

• Unbiased volumes. A new algorithm, based on null scattering, becomes the default. It removes the step settings (step size, max steps) and the blocky artefacts of overlapping volumes. Render time and noise change depending on the scene; the Biased option, in Render, Volume, brings back the old calculation.
• Smoke and fire in NanoVDB, which reduces memory at the cost of a little speed.
• Subsurface scattering with a multi-bounce random walk: less unwanted darkening, slightly more render time.
• Thin film effect on metals: the Principled BSDF and the Metallic BSDF render the iridescence of an oxide layer.
• Adaptive subdivision is no longer experimental and is turned on from the Subdivision Surface modifier.
• A Render Time pass shows the time spent on each pixel, which is useful for spotting what slows an image down.

EEVEE

Curve drawing has been rewritten for the Curves object type. One consequence is worth knowing: the resolution attribute, ignored until then, is now taken into account. According to the release notes, a hair system with default settings produces fifteen times more geometry in 5.0 than in 4.5, which can saturate the memory of a scene that used to render without trouble. View Layer Overrides (material, world, samples) are now applied by EEVEE, which changes the render of older files that used them. Finally, according to the release notes, simple materials compile four times faster with the NVIDIA OpenGL driver.

Nodes: closures, bundles and volume grids

Geometry Nodes and shader nodes get bundles, which group several values into a single link, and closures, which inject nodes to be evaluated into a node group. Shaders also gain the Repeat Zone: EEVEE accepts a variable number of iterations, Cycles a fixed number, by duplicating the nodes on each pass. Geometry Nodes can finally work directly on volume grids, with a series of dedicated nodes (mesh to distance field conversion, booleans on grids, filters).

Everything else

The compositing tree becomes a data-block that can be reused from one file to another, Grease Pencil supports motion blur, and compression of .blend files on save is turned on by default.

Blender 5.1

• Cycles performance: a 5 to 10% gain in GPU rendering on several test scenes, and often 5 to 20% in CPU rendering on Windows. On AMD cards, hardware ray tracing acceleration (HIP RT) is turned on by default.
• EEVEE: a Raycast node, limited to screen-space calculation, opens up stylisation effects; two indirect light intensity settings act on the final image. Material compilation is faster on every system: on the test scene in the release notes, without a shader cache and under Vulkan, it goes from 24.9 seconds in 5.0.1 to 11.7 seconds in 5.1.
• Libraries: move to Python 3.13, OpenColorIO 2.5, OpenEXR 3.4 and OpenVDB 13. An add-on that ships compiled modules may need an update.
• Grease Pencil: fills have been reworked. Files are converted automatically, but some procedural setups that mix Geometry Nodes and Grease Pencil materials need adjusting.

Blender 5.2 LTS

• Texture cache in Cycles. On scenes loaded with images, it clearly reduces memory use and start-up time, at the cost of slightly slower rendering and a little disk space. It is turned on in the render properties, Performance, Texture Cache, with the Auto Generate option: Blender creates a .tx file for each image in a blender_tx/ folder placed next to it. The command blender scene.blend --command maketx generates them from the command line.
• Simplify gains a texture resolution percentage, handy for the interactive preview of a heavy scene.
• EEVEE: screen-space ray tracing has been overhauled. Most scenes look the same, but some render darker than in 5.1 because of energy conservation fixes. The Fast GI fixes also change the look of files that use it. Scenes with many instances can be up to twice as fast.
• Subsurface scattering: the radius scale of the random walk has been adjusted; to keep the same render, older files are automatically converted to Random Walk (Legacy) mode.

What changes the render of an existing scene

Opening a 4.x project in Blender 5 works in the vast majority of cases, but the image may no longer be exactly the same. Before rendering a whole sequence again, render a test frame and compare it with the old one. The points to check, according to the release notes:

• volumes (smoke, fog), calculated by the new unbiased algorithm since 5.0;
• skin and translucent materials, because of the multiple bounces of subsurface scattering;
• Voronoi textures: the node is several times faster, but the resulting pattern is no longer the same;
• the Point Density node, removed in 5.0 and replaced by Geometry Nodes;
• hair and fur under EEVEE, whose amount of geometry can explode;
• compositing and scripts: many render passes have been renamed, for example DiffCol to Diffuse Color, IndexMA to Material Index and Z to Depth, and the identifier of the EEVEE engine changes from BLENDER_EEVEE_NEXT to BLENDER_EEVEE;
• under EEVEE in 5.2, screen-space ray tracing and Fast GI.

File compatibility between Blender 4.5 and Blender 5

Blender 5.0 changed the .blend file format, header included, to store meshes of several hundred million vertices. Blender 4.5 LTS can read this new format; earlier versions cannot. A file saved by Blender 5 must therefore be opened in 4.5 at the very least.

Even in 4.5, there are two limits:

• data names can be up to 255 bytes long since 5.0, against 63 before: 4.5 truncates them, and cannot link a data-block whose name is too long;
• packed linked data, new in 5.0, becomes ordinary local data in 4.5, as if it had been added with Append.

Blender 5.0 also removed several old features: Collada (.dae) import and export, particle caches compressed with LZMA or LZO, animation from before version 2.50 and files created on big-endian machines. Custom themes saved with an earlier version are not carried over, and add-ons that accessed properties defined at runtime without going through the intended API have to be fixed. In 5.2, the Python API for Geometry Nodes modifiers changed, and asset files containing Geometry Nodes tools have to be saved again.

System requirements: what no longer works

• Intel Macs: no longer supported since Blender 5.0. Blender 4.5 LTS is the last version released for these machines. The Blender on Mac guide covers Apple chips in detail.
• Older NVIDIA cards: Cycles requires a compute capability of at least 5.0, which is roughly the GeForce 900 series and newer.
• Drivers: OptiX required at least version 535 of the NVIDIA driver in 4.5, and requires 575 since Blender 5.2. The minimum driver versions for AMD on Windows and for Intel have also been raised.

Blender 4.5 LTS or Blender 5: which to choose?

Blender 4.5 LTS, the last version of the 4 series, is maintained until July 2027. It is also the last to include Collada and to exist for Intel Macs, and it brought a Vulkan backend on a par with OpenGL, which remained the default. A project started in 4.5 can safely be finished in it.

For a new project, Blender 5.2 LTS is the logical choice: two years of maintenance and all the new features of the 5.0 and 5.1 series. In a studio, what matters most is that everyone works on the same series: a file saved in 5.2 does not go back to 4.4. If you are learning Blender, the guide to learning Blender offers a path, and the Blender shortcuts are, for the most part, the same from one series to the next.

Which version of Blender to render on TURNA?

TURNA supports Blender 4.0 to 5.2. The add-on sends the version of Blender you are working in, and the render runs with the same series: a scene prepared in 5.2 is rendered by Blender 5.2, a scene in 4.5 by Blender 4.5. The render differences described above are therefore not added on top when you send a scene. Cycles only recognises the RTX 5090 from Blender 4.4 onwards: a scene sent from an earlier version is rendered on an RTX 4090. To estimate the duration of a sequence before sending it, the render time calculator works from the time of one frame.