Blender 4.1 is a less significant update than initially expected, as Eevee Next, the upcoming modernization of Blender's real-time rendering engine, has been postponed to Blender 4.2. However, by the standards of many DCC applications, even a minor Blender update signifies a wealth of new features, so below are listed the five most significant changes, including updates to Geometry Nodes, Cycles, and the Sequencer video editor.

Geometry Nodes: The new Bake node improves interactivity when working with complex setups.

In the Geometry Nodes toolkit, one of the key changes is the Bake node. It caches the output of a Blender node graph to disk, meaning it no longer needs to be evaluated on the fly, improving interactivity when working with complex setups. While it was possible to bake data in simulation areas before, the new node makes this feature available throughout the entire node graph. It has separate Bake Animation and Bake Still modes, depending on the data being baked. Additionally, significant improvements have been made to baking overall, which extend to modeling areas: the process now supports volumes that were previously simply removed during baking, retains materials, and generates smaller files.

Geometry Nodes: New Auto Smooth behavior for shaded meshes.
Another significant change in Blender 4.1 relates to how the program determines which parts of the mesh to display as hard edges and which as smooth surfaces. The old mesh property Auto Smooth has been replaced by a Geometry Nodes modifier. Changes are easier to understand when seen rather than read about, so the video above vividly demonstrates the differences between Blender 4.0 and 4.1. The new workflow has not received unanimous approval from early users, as evidenced by a lengthy thread on the Blender Artists forum. Nevertheless, this change brings Blender in line with other DCC applications and has several potential benefits, including opening up separate procedural and destructive workflows.

Cycles: Support for GPU-based noise reduction with Open Image Denoise.
The major change in Cycles, Blender's production rendering engine, is that noise reduction during rendering is now supported on the GPU using Open Image Denoise (OIDN). The open-source noise reduction system from Intel was originally intended only for CPU, but GPU-based noise reduction support was introduced in OIDN 2.0 released last year. Unlike the existing GPU denoising system in Cycles, OptiX, OIDN is hardware-independent and supported on NVIDIA, Intel, and Apple Silicon processors, with AMD support coming in Blender 4.2. It's also available on relatively older hardware, with support for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 16xx series cards released in 2016. The performance improvement can be quite significant: a test scene in Blender Junkshop executes noise reduction three times faster on a Mac with an M2 Ultra GPU compared to CPU. According to the release notes, the integration makes "full-quality" noise reduction available in the 3D viewport at interactive frame rates.

Sequencer: Now up to 20 times faster.
Sequencer, the video editor in Blender, has received its most significant update in several releases. The histogram, waveform, and vector scope have been redesigned to be easier to read at a glance, and filtering during video strip scaling or rotation has been improved. However, perhaps the most significant change is that Sequencer is now faster. Core tasks such as image processing, frame reading and writing, and color management have been sped up, with the user interface redrawn "3-4 times faster for complex timelines". Common effects have also been accelerated: from 1.5 times for Gaussian Blur to 6-10 times for Glow effects and up to 20 times for Wipes.

File Import: Import 3D models by dragging and dropping them into the viewport.
Blender 4.1 also brings the program in line with other DCC applications, enabling the import of 3D assets by simply dragging and dropping them into the interface. This process, made possible by the new File Handler API, is supported in both the 3D viewport and Outliner for Alembic, OBJ, PLY, STL, and USD files, but not yet for FBX files. Additionally, Grease Pencil strokes and SVG vector files can also be dragged and dropped. Furthermore, PLY became the latest file format to receive a new C++ exporter, making file export "3-10 times faster" than the old Python exporter.
The user interface has undergone a number of small but useful changes, including the addition of placeholder text in input fields to indicate the type of data Blender expects. The 3D modeling toolkit has seen several improvements in curve drawing, including the ability to create NURBS curves directly using the Draw tool. In addition to the aforementioned new features, key geometry nodes now operate faster, with Extrude Mesh being "over 6 times faster for large meshes" in particular.

In character rigging, the new bone collection system introduced in Blender 4.0 is now hierarchical and can be merged to optimize workflow in complex projects. In animation, the Graph Editor received a new Bake Channels operator for baking F-curves, providing more control than the old workflow by allowing specification of the baking time range, interval between baked keys, and interpolation mode for new keys. It's also possible to bake modifier stack effects onto keys and remove that stack.
VFX artists working on shots with animated cameras gain the ability to create motion paths relative to the active camera. For lighting and shading, point and spotlights received a new Soft Falloff option, restoring their behavior in Blender 3.6 and earlier versions, while the Musgrave and Noise Texture nodes were merged into a single combined Noise Texture node. The new Viewport Compositor, introduced in Blender 3.5, now supports all Blender compositing nodes and also supports depth pass in Eevee and Workbench. Lastly, for Python pipeline integration, it was updated to use the latest CY2024 VFX Reference Platform specification, including the transition to Python 3.11.

Blender 4.1 is available for Windows 8.1 and above, macOS 10.15 and above (macOS 11.0 on Apple Silicon Macs), and glibc 2.28 and above Linux. It can be downloaded for free.