Blender is a free and open source 3D computer graphics software toolset for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D applications, VR, and computer games. With the release of Blender 3.4, Blender developers have started talking about increasing Blender’s CPU requirements so that the open source 3D modeling software can perform better.

Currently, the minimum requirement for running Blender is an x86/x86_64 CPU with SSE2 instruction set or a newer version. The full name of SSE2 is Streaming SIMD Extensions 2. 2001 With the release of Intel’s first generation Pentium 4 processorAlso launched together.

Of course, SSE2 is too old, as long as it is not an antique CPU in the 20th century, it can basically meet this requirement. Therefore, Thomas Dinges, the Blender developer community coordinator, initiated a discussion on increasing the minimum CPU requirements for running Blender, hoping to change Blender’s minimum CPU requirements to the SSE4.1 instruction set, which was released with Intel in 2007. The 45nm “Penryn” processor is released.

There are two benefits to jumping to more advanced instruction sets, first more modern CPUs will definitely improve performance in Blender’s various heavy calculation functions, and second, Blender Cycles are currently SSE2, SSE3, SSE41, AVX and AVX2 instruction sets respectively Compiling various kernels and increasing the supported instruction level can reduce the code and compilation time of the software.

In addition to upgrading to SSE4.1 , this discussion also mentions upgrading toThe possibility of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), but the AVX part is quite controversial and may need more opinions and discussions, interested friendsFurther details can be found in this Blender DevTalk.