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Blender 4.4: Cycles

GPU Rendering

NVIDIA

  • Support GeForce RTX 50x0 series (Blackwell). (PR#134170)

AMD

  • Support AMD RX 90x0 series (RDNA4). (PR#133129)
  • HIP RT is no longer experimental, and will be enabled by default in the next release. The HIP RT library was upgraded to version 2.5 and many bugs were fixed. (PR#133129)
  • HIP RT on RDNA1 GPUs is no longer available. These GPUs do not benefit from hardware ray-tracing, and there are stability issues. (PR#135179)
  • The minimum required ROCm version on Linux has increased to 6.0 (PR#133129) (PR#130153)
  • The minimum required Windows GPU driver has increased to Adrenalin version 24.6.1 or Radeon Pro driver 24.Q2 (PR#134965)

Intel

  • The minimum driver version required on Intel GPUs has increased to 101.6557 on Windows and 31740.8 on Linux. (PR#133457)
  • Improved image texture sampling performance. (PR#133457)
  • Smaller Blender package size by compressing kernels. (PR#134049)

General

  • More robust host memory fallback when the GPU runs out of memory. (PR#132912)

Other

  • Bump Mapping: More accurately render sub-pixel bump mapping. This changes the look of some renders, but should typically provide more accurate results and be more stable in animations. However, if there is a sharp transition in the Height input, the look may differ significantly; to achieve a similar look as before, it is suggested to scale the Distance input by a factor of 0.1, or to use a smooth function instead. (PR#133991)
  • Open Shading Language: Improved closure compatibility with MaterialX. (PR#133612, PR#133597, PR#133575, PR#133797, PR#133845)
  • Baking: Speed up Selected to Active baking. (PR#128964)

OptiX Denoiser

The NVIDIA OptiX denoiser was updated to improve denoising quality. When using recent drivers, the improved denoiser is already used automatically in older Blender versions. (793918f2b1)

Improvements in denoising quality can manifest as more consistent denoising, more accurate colours, better retention of detail, and less denoising blotching. In some situations denoising quality can decrease.

Old Denoiser New Denoiser (Scene by Metin Seven)

Sample Subset

To correctly distribute the blue noise sampling pattern across multiple computers, the sample offset feature has been modified. There is now a Sample Subset toggle with both an Offset and Sampling length. (f09fd9bdef)

Scripts for distributed rendering using this feature need to be updated.

Please refer to the Blender manual for details.