Blender 4.5 is out, serving as the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release of the much-revered cross-platform 3D modelling and animation suite.
While a lot of hype has been generated over features planned for Blender 5.0, the the Blender 4.5 change-log is by no means meek, offering a mix of performance, usability and tooling tweaks.
“With 2 years of updates, full Vulkan support, and quality-of-life improvements, Blender 4.5 LTS is every Blenderhead’s best friend,” the launch page states.
The promise of full Vulkan support ‘on par with OpenGL’ is the big draw in this release, gaining support for more features on Windows/Linux like OpenXR, Subdivision, and USD/Hydra. Limitations remain, and it is not enabled by default – flicking a switch in Preferences required.
If trying the Vulkan backend in Blender 4.5 on Linux, those with AMD GPUs are advised to use Mesa 25.3 (or newer)—FYI: Ubuntu 24.04 is getting Mesa 25.0.7 as a HWE update—and Linux users with NVIDIA GPUs need driver version 550 or higher.
Other changes and additions in Blender 4.5 LTS:
- New Geometry Nodes focused on data access and string handling
- New Grease Pencil nodes have been added
- Denoise node now supports GPU devices
- Procedural texture nodes now available in the Compositor
- “Boundary Strokes” renamed “Fill Guides”
- Option to only show onion skinning for the active object in Viewport
- SVG exporter can now export animations
- Multi-threaded shader compilation enabled by default
- Liquid simulation performance improved by 1.25x – 1.5x
- Playhead element snapping available in all timeline editors
- Video Sequencer supports HDR
- Faster texture loading in EEVEE
- New shadow terminator bias
- Support for writing ProRes codec videos
- User interface buffs, including large cursors for HiDPI on Linux
As for all recent releases, anyone looking to learn more can watch a video recap from Blender which highlights the key changes. Detailed release notes are available for those who prefer to read.
For macOS users, Blender 4.5 is the last release to support Intel-based Macs. Blender 5.0 will be the first version only officially available for macOS on Apple Silicon (unofficial builds could appear as Blender is is open source software).
Installing Blender 4.5 on Ubuntu
Blender is free, open-source software available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
While an older version of Blender is available to install on Ubuntu straight from the repos using sudo apt install blender, to benefit from the changes mentioned in this post users can install Blender from the Snap Store, or download a binary from the official Blender website.
For Linux, Blender’s system requirements ask for a distro equipped with glibc 2.28 or newer (Ubuntu has this), a quad-core CPU with SSE4.2 support, 8GB RAM, and a dedicated GPU with at least 2GB VRAM and OpenGL 4.3 support — Vulkan requirements listed further up this page.