Blender 4.1 Adds Geometry Nodes Baking and GPU Denoising

A quality-of-life release

Blender 4.1 was released on March 26, 2024. The Blender Foundation called it a solid release with quality-of-life improvements and performance enhancements across the board, aligned with the VFX Reference Platform 2024 and upgrading Python to version 3.11.

Geometry Nodes baking

Geometry Nodes gained the ability to bake data inside node groups so inputs do not have to be recomputed, supporting both still frames and animations as well as volume objects, with baked ranges shown on the node and in the Timeline. New nodes arrived too, including a Menu Switch node that creates custom enum dropdowns in the modifier, Index Switch, Split to Instances and Sort Elements, and a new Smooth by Angle modifier replaced the old mesh Auto Smooth option.

GPU-accelerated denoising

In Cycles, OpenImageDenoise is now GPU accelerated on supported hardware, making high-quality denoising available at interactive rates in the 3D viewport and for final renders, enabled automatically when GPU rendering. The release also added AMD GPU rendering support for RDNA3 APUs and improved Linux CPU rendering performance by about 5%.

Sequencer, compositor and rigging

The Video Sequencer became significantly faster, with 3x-4x faster timeline drawing, a 6x-10x faster glow effect, and greatly improved image filtering that picks the most appropriate filter based on scale. The viewport compositor added Cryptomatte, Defocus, Vector Blur and Keying Screen support, and bone collections became hierarchical, shown in a nestable tree with solo support.

Related on Skillo

See also: Blender 4.0 and the Principled BSDF overhaul, Blender 4.2 LTS and EEVEE Next.

Sources

• Blender 4.1 release notes (blender.org)

Published date reflects the original event date (2024-03-26). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.