Those performance improvements are insane. People who were considering upgrading their hardware for blender before this update no long need to.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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I see they had to respond to PicoCAD 2 dropping.
Woohoo, great news!
What impossibly expensive GPU will I need to buy to even run this one?
I think how good of a GPU you need is almost entirely dependent on the complexity of the scene itself.
I was gonna say, I used to render pretty sick Videos on a 1070, I think you'll be fine unless you work at Pixar.
And it's not like Blender is made for real time rendering anyways. If three seconds of video takes a day to render, that's still fine.
I rendered a 5min 4k60 video in blender / octane for a month, which suggests modern cards should easily do more chill tasks. And if you genuinely need the setup I did, you have 10x the work just taking care of modelling,particles, vfx afterfx, composition cut, ...
Either you reached that level or you didn't
What I meant was Blender is very bad at degrading gracefully to work fairly well with older OpenGL versions. As soon as your stuff is just a tad older than Blender supports, that's it. You're left out in the cold.
I have very modest Blender needs (mostly I need to rework prosthesis models for 3D-printing), my GPU is fairly recent but very low spec, yet sufficient for what I need. But the driver only implements OpenGL 3.0, so essentially I'm stuck with Blender 4.0.2 if I want to make use of hardware acceleration.
Any higher version and Blender simply pukes out a message saying that my GPU doesn't have the features it requires. Or I have to degrade to software GL, which is not acceptable.
Blender has always been like that. The Blender developers assume their audience is mostly professionals with endless resources to throw at their software project, and they just don't give a rat's ass about making their stuff usable for people with older hardware.
I have very modest Blender needs (mostly I need to rework prosthesis models for 3D-printing), my GPU is fairly recent but very low spec, yet sufficient for what I need. But the driver only implements OpenGL 3.0, so essentially I’m stuck with Blender 4.0.2 if I want to make use of hardware acceleration.
You said it yourself, that's a card problem
If it’s not super secret what you’re doing, you could use SheepIt. I’ve not used it myself as I’m not really good with anything that’s art, but have had my server do CPU render tasks. It also supports GPU rendering.
I've attempted to learn it before but struggled. That was a long time ago. Is now the time to try again with these latest quality of life features mentioned?
If so, who has some good learning resources?
Depends when you last tried, what version. If it was anything before 2.8, it's in many ways a different program.
I learned so much by just finding tutorial videos that walked me through general or specific tasks I was trying to accomplish.