Blender 2.79 Now Available With Much Faster Radeon OpenCL

Today marks the long-awaited debut of the Blender 2.79 3D modeling software release. Especially for those using OpenCL acceleration, Blender 2.79 is quite an exciting update.

Exciting us the most about Blender 2.79 is better OpenCL support and much greater performance. The performance improvements in Blender 2.79 aren't limited to OpenCL (or CUDA) but include greater performance on the CPU too thanks to continued AVX optimizations as well as continued multi-threading work. On the CPU side there can be 10~20% speed-ups while for some situations on OpenCL are now as much as 50% faster.

Blender 2.79 also has better HiDPI support, an overhauled video output system, a new denoiser, PBR shader, shadow catcher, filmic color management, and a reported 700+ bug fixes.

Learn all of the exciting details about Blender 2.79 via Blender.org. I'll work on getting out some new Blender 2.79 benchmarks shortly.