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Blender 4.5 LTS: Cycles

Adaptive Subdivision

While the feature is still experimental, several improvements have been made that bring it closer to being production-ready.

  • Support previously missing features. (PR#135681)
    • Attribute subdivision
    • Smooth UV subdivision
    • Motion blur
  • Modifier subdivision levels are now ignored. (PR#135895)
  • Multithreading to improve performance. (PR#136411)
  • Reduced vertex and triangle count when no subdivision is needed.

Bump Mapping

  • Improved bump correction. The new correction avoids washed out areas near the shadow terminator, preserving more detail from normal and bump maps. (PR#135380)
  • New Filter Width input on the Bump node. This defaults to 0.1, while higher values like 1.0 may be used to emulate a bevel like effect on sharp edges in textures, like a procedural checker texture or pixel art image with closest filtering. (PR#136465)

Custom Cameras

In addition to the built-in camera types (perspective, orthographic and panoramic), it's now possible to implement custom cameras using Open Shading Language. This can be enabled independently of OSL shading, but requires hardware support and is therefore currently limited to CPU and OptiX devices. (PR#129495, documentation)

GPU Rendering

NVIDIA

  • The minimum driver version required for OptiX has increased to 535. (0add3f31a2)

AMD

There are known stability issues in Blender 4.5.0 LTS. These are being worked on together with AMD to resolve in a future release.

  • RDNA2 GPUs have rendering artifacts in volumes on Windows. (#139071)
  • HIP RT has stability issues that can lead to crashes while editing objects in the viewport.

Intel

  • GPU hardware ray-tracing package from the Ubuntu repository does not work on Ubuntu 25.04 due to incompatible TBB versions. There is a message saying that the installation of a package is required, even when the package is installed. The recommendation for this case (and in general) is to install the Intel driver from the Intel launchpad repository, following the Intel Client GPU instructions. Be sure to install the package libze-intel-gpu-raytracing.
  • When more than one Intel GPU is present and used for rendering, there may be crashes. A solution to this is already in Blender 5.0 alpha and planned for Blender 4.5.1, with the root cause to be fixed in a future Intel Driver release.