Blender, the popular free open-source 3D computer graphics software, announced new 4.4 release few days ago.

The new release added many exciting new features, improved performances, and fixed over 700 issues.

Blender 4.4 adds support for rendering videos using the H.265/HEVC codec, which supports resolutions up to 8192×4320. And during rendering, user can set a color depth of 10 or 12 bits for supported codecs.

Video Sequencer in the released introduced edit mode support for text strips in preview. It also allows to align multi-line text strips to left, right, or center. And many operations such as float/HDR content preview, Curves, Hue Correct, White Balance modifiers, and sequencer effects are much faster than before.

text strips edit in preview

For animation workflows, the release introduced new Action Slots feature, allowing multiple data-blocks share a single Action. For 3D modeling, there’s new option in the Select by Trait operator to select pole count. And, Sculpt mode got a new Plane brush type.

The window decorations now follow the theme colors on Windows 11 and macOS. On macOS, you can now preview blend file contents in a thumbnail in Finder, App Exposé and Spotlight.

Other changes include CPU compositor rewritten that provides significant improvements in performance, revamped Glare node with new control options, as well as:

• New node “Find in String”.
• New input nodes: Collection and Object.
• New “Limit Surface” option available in the Subdivision Surface node.
• Performance: Triangulate node is 30x to 100x faster.
• Sort Elements node is 50% faster in common scenarios.
• Render ACC (.acc) audio format.
• New bpy.app.module in Python API indicates if Blender is running as Python module.
• Support NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50×0 series (Blackwell), and AMD RX 90×0 series (RDNA4) GPUs.
• Fixed text pasting from Blender to certain apps (e.g., Firefox) not working under Linux X11.

For more about Blender 4.4, see the official release note.

How to Get Blender 4.4

Blender website provides the pre-built packages for Linux, Windows, macOS, and Steam, as well as the source tarball available via the link below:

For Ubuntu, user can simply search and install the Blender snap package from Ubuntu Software (or App Center for 24.04 and later), or download and install the Linux tarball. For beginners, here’s a step by step guide shows you how.