Blender 3.3 LTS deepens support for Radeon and Intel and improves performance

Blender 3.3 LTS has already been released as the latest stable version of the well-known 3D graphics creation and rendering solution. This release is LTS as it has two years of support and stands out for advancing in the integration of Intel and AMD technologies, which comes in handy in a sector strongly dominated by NVIDIA.

For starters we have support for the backend oneAPI . Intel’s return to the dedicated graphics card space has turned out to be rather disappointing due to Windows drivers which, at least at the time of release, were in a pretty sorry state . However, this turn of the company is not only motivated by gaming , but is also strongly tied to professional computing and its oneAPI development platform. Support in Blender is still under development and Linux requires driver 22.26.23570 or later to use it.

AMD Radeon is another attempt to gain a foothold where NVIDIA shows clear dominance. On this front we find the enabling of GPU rendering for the generation of Vega graphics in both Windows and Linux . Despite the veteran architecture, models such as the Radeon VII, the Vega 56 and 64, and the Radeon Pro WX 9100 continue to show themselves to be quite capable, to the point of standing up to graphics from later generations in some contexts .

Apple wants to get rid of Intel to bet on its own ARM-based processor architecture. Here GPU rendering via the Metal API has been improved through optimizations for memory access locality and intersection cores.

And despite attempts by Intel and AMD to gain a foothold, NVIDIA still has a lot to say in an industry it dominates. As far as the green giant’s technologies are concerned, we find a performance improvement from Optix’s denoiser when rendering across multiple graphics cards .

At the user interface level we find a reorganization to facilitate the use of the Override Libraries after placing them in their own submenu. As for the crayon, a tool that usually appears quite often in our Blender posts, performance for LineArt has been significantly improved through new object loading code and a new line art construction method. quad trees in multitasking. Sculpting performance is also greatly improved by activating EEVEE.

Finally we have, within what Blender categorizes as Pipeline, assets and input-output, improved performance when importing USD, Alembic and OBJ files with massive amounts of targets . The time reduction on this front is so great that importing a USB production scene with 260,000 lenses can go from 3.5 hours to 1.5 minutes .

All details about Blender 3.3 are published in the official announcement and release notes , while the application can be obtained from the download section of the project’s official website . For Linux there are also Flatpak and Snap for those users who are not willing to deal with their system dependencies. We leave you with a video in which they expose all the new features of this release.