Blender 4.3 Released With AMD HIP-RT Ray-Tracing On Linux, Experimental Vulkan Backend

Blender 4.3 is out today as the newest feature update to this leading open-source 3D modeling software.

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.