Most exciting for Linux users with Blender 4.3 is finally boasting AMD HIP-RT support for ray-tracing on Radeon graphics cards as well as having an experimental Vulkan option for rendering the Blender UI .
Some of the key highlights for Blender 4.3 consist of:
- Blender 4.3 finally supports HIP-RT on Linux for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing with AMD graphics cards. Blender is now using the open-source HIP-RT libraries on both Windows and Linux.
- Improvements to the Cycles Volume Scattering node.
- Eevee now has feature parity with Cycles thanks to the latest light and shadow linking work.
- There is an experimental Vulkan back-end for rendering the Blender user interface on Windows and Linux. This Vulkan back-end is still considered an early stage feature and will be improved upon moving forward as an alternative to the OpenGL-based UI.
- Geometry Nodes now support working with Grase Pencil data.
- Experimental Windows on Arm support.
- glTF import and export enhancements.
- Various performance optimizations.
More details on the Blender 4.3 changes via the release notes . Blender 4.3 can be downloaded at Blender.org . New CPU/GPU Blender benchmarks soon.