A new era for Blender has begun – Blender 5.0 is a major step forward.

Many new features are included in this version, but unfortunately, this also means that many artists with older hardware will now have to remain on Blender 4.5 LTS. Some platforms and hardware configurations are no longer supported! I will be taking this into account in my training courses.

Many areas have undergone a massive overhaul:
ACES Colorspace, color management in general, adaptive subdivision, multi-resolution baking, shader nodes improvements, NanoVDB, Compositor improvments, VSE, and of course, numerous improvements to Geometry Nodes.
I love specially the Drag & Drop compositor setups and the ability to save out node-setups for the use in other files.

Again the Blender team made a wonderful overview page for all the features:
https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-0/

Here’s the usual feature overview as a video, this time over 50 minutes long:
https://youtu.be/4wEqD-jK0DU?si=Ah2WbuMHIp2OixY2

The Story Tools have also been integrated now:
https://youtu.be/4wEqD-jK0DU?si=Ah2WbuMHIp2OixY2

Here is also a nice overview for the Grease Pencil features:
https://youtu.be/WYZY4n3fRM0?si=mLoz83gI6VMXA-6I

And here for the Blender 5.0 Animations & Rigging updates:
https://youtu.be/s3kcPME65ic?si=SCA6NiqO_3-ZPb_0

Overall, a very large update. I’m curious to see how these features are received in practice by the community.