Blender 5.2 LTS Introduces New Cycles Texture Cache System

As always, the Blender developers are staying productive: Blender 5.1 was released just this March, and Blender 5.2 LTS is currently in alpha, with a full release expected in July.

We've seen some previews of what's coming, and optimization is clearly getting attention: rendering scenes with many image textures looks set to become much more memory-efficient. The new Cycles Texture Cache loads only the image tiles and resolutions needed.

For every image, a matching .tx file gets created in a blender_tx/ folder next to it. That file is optimized so that only the texture tiles and resolutions needed for rendering are loaded, instead of the whole image. The idea is to keep things simple for users: .tx files are automatically regenerated whenever the source image changes, and settings like color space and filtering are inferred from how the texture is actually used in shader nodes.

This feature is already in daily builds, with more improvements on the way for render farms, production pipelines, and more. It works across CPU and all GPU backends. The numbers below reportedly come from benchmark scenes that rely heavily on image textures:

Testing is, as usual, strongly encouraged, along with reporting any bugs to the tracker and providing feedback in the DevTalk topic. Learn more about Cycles Texture Cache in the official blog post.

Also, in case you missed it, Anthropic's earlier Corporate Patron status in the Blender Development Fund has now been reduced to a one-time donation. Claude's Blender connector should remain unaffected by this change.

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