Blender 4.5 LTS has launched today, bringing two years of long-term support and a significant wave of upgrades. This release marks the definitive end of official support for Intel Macs, delivers substantial workflow acceleration, and introduces a major overhaul of the compositor node system. These updates are directly relevant to studios, VFX supervisors, and technical artists looking for performance and consistency across Blender’s toolset.
Intel Mac Support Ends, Collada Deprecated
With Blender 4.5 LTS, official support for Intel-based Macs comes to an end. This is the final release to offer an Intel Mac build; all subsequent versions will require Apple Silicon hardware, which may prompt pipeline adjustments for facilities relying on legacy Apple systems. The release notes also clarify that Collada import and export functionality, although still present in 4.5, is deprecated and will be removed entirely from Blender 5.0 onward.
Major Performance Gains
Blender 4.5 LTS delivers improved performance throughout the application. The dependency graph, crucial for handling complex scenes, now builds up to 18 percent faster than in previous versions. Adaptive subdivision has been fully multithreaded, offering a dramatic speed boost when working with dense geometry. Artists dealing with simulation-heavy tasks will notice that physics, particularly liquid simulations, now run 1.25 to 1.5 times faster and benefit from increased stability.
The Video Sequencer also sees faster processing, notably in color space conversions and auto-rotation, allowing for smoother editorial workflows. Importing assets via FBX is now significantly quicker, with speed increases of up to fifteen times and improved compatibility for a broader range of formats. Taken together, these enhancements make Blender 4.5 the fastest and most robust LTS version to date, and are especially impactful for artists handling heavy assets or tight post-production deadlines.
New: Unified Compositor Nodes
A core highlight of Blender 4.5 LTS is the expanded and modernized Compositor Node system. Blender’s development team has focused on aligning the logic and capabilities of compositor nodes with those of the shader and geometry node trees. This unification is aimed at eradicating workflow inconsistencies that have long challenged artists and technical directors moving between different parts of Blender.
The new release introduces a series of important nodes. Vector Math and Vector Rotate nodes are now available in the compositor, allowing users to perform complex vector operations such as direction-based blurs and procedural image transformations directly within their compositing setups. The Clamp node and Float Curve node provide refined control over value ranges and non-linear remapping, making it easier to manage masks, intensities, and procedural effects with precision.
The Blackbody node allows users to convert temperature values, expressed in Kelvin, into RGB colors—ideal for creating photorealistic fire, relighting, and physically accurate color effects in compositing. The new Image Info and Image Coordinates nodes make it possible to use metadata and coordinate data for resolution-aware setups, procedural overlays, and position-based transformations, supporting smarter and more adaptive node graphs. Texture nodes, including Image Texture and Environment Texture, are now natively supported within the compositor, removing the need for previous workaround solutions and enabling direct compositing of images, maps, and procedural textures. The Relative-to-Pixel node adds the ability to convert between normalized and pixel space, which is critical for procedural overlays and precise mask operations.
For production artists and technical directors, these additions mean that node-based logic and techniques learned in geometry or shading contexts can now be applied seamlessly in compositing. This reduces friction for cross-disciplinary teams and supports automated, metadata-driven comp workflows. The ability to leverage Blackbody color conversion and procedural coordinate manipulation directly in the compositor opens up new creative and technical possibilities, from FX relighting to smarter pipeline automation.
Asset Pipeline & I/O Upgrades
Blender 4.5 LTS also refines its asset pipeline and exchange capabilities. The release introduces support for importing and exporting animated USD cameras and shapes, making Blender a more capable participant in high-end VFX and animation workflows. Users can now bulk import SVGs, export to ProRes, and benefit from OpenEXR improvements, all of which streamline the movement of assets between Blender and external tools. Path templates for renders and file nodes have become more robust and scriptable, enabling greater automation in production environments. Additionally, Windows users will notice improved crash recovery tools, helping safeguard against lost work during complex sessions.
Deprecation Warnings
It is important for studios and artists to note that Blender 4.5 LTS is the last release to support Intel Macs, and future versions will be focused solely on Apple Silicon. Support for big-endian platforms is also being removed, further modernizing Blender’s hardware compatibility. Collada support, as mentioned above, is deprecated in 4.5 and will not return in Blender 5.0.
Why Upgrade?
As a Long-Term Support release, Blender 4.5 offers two years of backported bugfixes and a foundation of stability. With accelerated workflows, a unified and modern compositor node set, and enhanced interoperability for asset pipelines, this release represents a clear upgrade for studios planning new projects or seeking a reliable daily driver. The removal of Intel Mac support signals a shift to more current hardware, so facilities should plan accordingly.
