Blender 2.9 Released

The latest version users the power of the 2.8x series and polishes the user experience, and introduces improvements to EEVEE, Cycles, sculpt, VR, animation, modeling, UV editing and more.

First, there's Nishita, a physically-based texture built-in Cycles. You can now download this file and play with the new goodie. 

Also, "Motion blur in EEVEE has been completely rewritten from scratch," states the team. They added support for mesh deformation, hair, and sub-frame accumulation for better precision.

As for Intel Embree, it is now used for ray tracing on the CPU improving Cycles performance in scenes with motion blur. They also noted that scenes with high geometric complexity also benefit on average.

Intel OpenImageDenoise in the compositor, introduced in Blender 2.81, can now be used interactively in the 3D viewport as well as for final renders.

There's also a new shadow terminator offset setting that will let you avoid shading artifacts with smooth normals on low-poly meshes.

Ther's more, of course. You can learn all about the new version here.