This is going to be useful for sand and water splashes, or other motion graphics effects, but it's also setting the stage for some really cool stuff, including better compatibility with other software (via alembic). One neat thing is the point cloud stuff, both direct rendering and geometry nodes getting to work with point clouds better. Blender 3.2 is currently scheduled for a June 8th release later this year. I believe this is already in the 3.2 alpha build for testing, it just didn't quite make it for 3.1. Unfortunately, if you're on Linux with an AMD GPU, you're going to have to wait for HIP support in 3.2.

If you're on a recent Mac with an M1 chip or AMD GPU, chances are you're gonna love 3.1. There's a lot you can read there, but I'd say one of the biggest pieces of news for Mac users is Metal support in Cycles. The full 3.1 release notes are already available on the Blender wiki. In the past, they usually have done a quick 1-ish minute video quickly showing off a bunch of stuff, and then there's another longer 5-ish minute video going into a bit more detail on new features and fixes (UPDATE: here's the new 5 minute show feature video). Around that same time 3.1 launches on we should see a new features reel showcase on the official Blender Foundation YouTube channel. If you get Blender updates automatically through an app store of some kind (Steam, Snap, Microsoft), there may be some delay in when 3.1 updates from those places (usually no more than a few hours), but you can always get the latest release direct from if you don't want to wait. The official release should happen sometime tomorrow afternoon (CET, UTC+1) with the main website switching over to 3.1, assuming nothing crazy happens with the daily build (UPDATE: 3.1 is now available from the main download page). In the next hours, the build will start to be compiled and packaged for all platforms and start showing up on the daily builds page (UPDATE: The 3.1 daily build is now listed as stable, and is the release version, reflected on the splash screen). There doesn't seem to be any showstoppers for 3.1 being released so it should go ahead tomorrow. The next daily build they do should be the same as the release build. Per the Bf-committers email list, Blender 3.1 just entered 'bcon5', which means it's being released in the next day. The Blender 3.1 splash screen by orencloud.

Blender 3 release