Following its planned release timeline, Blender Foundation has introduced Blender 5.1 to the wider community. This is the first major update to Blender 5 which first launched in November, 2025. The main focus of this release is on the stability and performance of Blender; for the second year in a row, the developers dedicated December and January to fixing stability issues, improving the code base, and hunting bugs. However, there are plenty of new features to learn about as well. Below, we have highlighted some of these.
Animation Workspace
The performance of animation playback in Blender has been improved. There was a noticeable slowing in how the animation would be played in real-time in the animation workspace. In Blender 5.1, Shape Key evaluation became just as fast (if not faster) as it was in 4.2. This is especially noticeable on high-poly objects. The same improvements can be seen when evaluating actions for armatures with a high number of keyed bones.
A quality-of-life improvement has been made to the Dope Sheet: interpolation lines are now color-coded to indicate their type (Constant, Linear, or Bezier). It is no longer necessary to click between keyes to determine the interpolation type, making work with complex animations easier and faster.
There is also a new F-curve modifier, Smooth (Gaussian), which works the same way as the Smooth operator but in a non-destructive manner. In addition, you can now perform Replace Action on multiple objects at once.
Faster Loading and Rendering
EEVEE received a significant performance boost. Materials now compile up to 50% faster by pre-compiling GPU pipelines, and GPU shaders compile faster thanks to the pre-processing of shader sources. EEVEE occupies less memory for storing textures by overlapping render and framebuffer textures at different points within one frame.
For Cycles, rendering speeds were increased. GPU rendering is now up to 10% faster, while CPU rendering on Windows machines got a 20% speed boost. Fast rendering is cheap rendering. You can compare the performance of 5.0 and 5.1 versions using our Blender render farm.
Even More Intuitive Modeling
Blender is well-known for its smooth workflow when it comes to hard-surface modelling. But there’s always room for improvement. A new option was added to the Snap tool: the Snap to Face Center lets you place objects in the middle of the face currently under the cursor.
New delimiters have been added to the loop and ring selection tools, and they can be selected in the Adjust Last Operation panel (which appears in the bottom-left corner of the active viewport by default) after making a selection. Face Loops can now be stopped at seams, sharp edges, and material boundaries, while Edge Rings can be limited by the same delimiters with an additional option to skip even-sided n-gons. Boundary Loops can now stop at inner and outer corners, in addition to the existing n-gon behavior.
The workflow for mirroring objects has also been improved with a new option to apply Corrective Flip Normals when transferring transforms from the original object to its mirrored counterpart. This makes it easier to prevent normals from being flipped without needing an additional modifier.
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