It's the [1]Blender 5.0 release day! Blender 5.0 is a big step forward for this open-source 3D modeling software with better Vulkan viewport support across different GPUs/drivers, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other very nice refinements for this popular cross-platform software package.

The Blender 5.0 release day is a bit of a mess due to the Cloudflare outage happening today. While much of the Cloudflare outage has since been addressed and services restored (including at Phoronix), Blender.org is still having HTTP 500 errors due to Cloudflare.

For those eager to try out the Blender 5.0 release binaries, they can be found via [2]this mirror for those having troubles accessing Blender.org.

Blender 5.0 is set to deliver a variety of animation enhancements, HDR and wide color gamut support on Linux when using Vulkan and Wayland, a human base mesh bundle has been contributed by the community for a realistic skeleton asset, larger buffers in Blend files, big endian support has been removed, curves drawing has been rewritten, support for LZO and LZMA has been dropped in favor of Zstd for point caches, various file format handling improvements, improved Vulkan support, and much more. [3]AMD HIP-RT is also now considered stable in Blender 5.0 but not being enabled by default until Blender 5.1 next year.

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More details on the many great changes with Blender 5.0 via the [5]release notes that thankfully aren't affected by the Cloudflare outage.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Blender+5.0

[2] https://mirror.clarkson.edu/blender/release/Blender5.0/

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-HIP-RT-Blender-5-Status

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=blender_50_lrg

[5] https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/5.0/