The Blender Foundation has released Blender 5.1 as the first maintenance update to the 5.x series for this popular open-source 3D creation suite.
Animation playback is significantly faster, with action evaluation speeds more than doubling in some cases, and shapekey evaluation increasing by over 300% on complex meshes. These improvements are especially noticeable in rigs with thousands of bones and dense geometry.
Rendering also sees measurable gains. Cycles delivers around 5–10% improved GPU performance across benchmark scenes, while EEVEE introduces faster material compilation through parallel GPU pipeline processing and shader preprocessing. Memory usage in EEVEE is reduced through more efficient texture handling, lowering GPU memory requirements in demanding scenes.
The animation and rigging toolset receives several targeted upgrades. A new operator allows replacing actions across multiple objects, simplifying complex scene management. The Gaussian Smooth modifier enables non-destructive F-Curve smoothing, while weight painting gains improved selection workflows. Shape key handling is expanded with a new “Apply to Basis” operator.
In rendering and shading, EEVEE introduces a new Raycast node for screen-space ray queries, enabling effects such as stylized shading. Additional controls for light path intensity allow global adjustments to indirect lighting without altering the underlying light transport. Planar reflections now support glossy reflections and refraction, further improving visual fidelity.
The compositor adds new nodes, including Mask to SDF and Sequencer Strip Info, as well as broader node support, such as Index Switch and Radial Tiling. Performance improvements affect several nodes, including blur and distortion operations, which are now up to twice as fast in some scenarios.
Geometry Nodes adds new tools for volume grids, including nodes for dilation, erosion, median and mean calculations, and point cloud conversion. The String to Curves node now has fully exposed inputs and a new font socket.
Grease Pencil receives a major workflow overhaul. Filling strokes are now handled by dedicated tools rather than materials, with support for holes and improved editing operations. Performance is improved when working with long strokes, and new operators simplify fill and stroke management.
Blender 5.1 expands file format support with AVIF for high-efficiency image compression and HDR support. OpenEXR gains a new HTJ2K lossless encoding option, and video output now allows custom quality control through manually defined CRF values. Audio export limits are increased, supporting bitrates up to 2048 kb/s.
On Linux, the release brings notable platform-specific changes. Wayland support is improved with client-side window decorations, and a new command-line option allows launching Blender without window borders, removing reliance on libdecor. Internally, the project replaces the unmaintained jemalloc allocator with TBB malloc and transitions to the C++20 standard.
Additional improvements span the entire application, including faster undo operations, enhanced UI responsiveness, better asset library controls, and expanded node editor capabilities such as cross-instance copy and paste.
Blender 5.1 is available now for download from the project’s mirrors. For a deep dive on all novelties, see the release notes.
