Blender 3 released

The Blender Foundation has announced that Blender 3.0 is has been officially released. New features include:

Cycles GPU kernels have been rewritten for better performance, rendering between 2x and 8x faster in real-world scenes.
More responsive viewports.
Upgraded OpenImageDenoise.
A new option to improve shadow termination on low-poly meshes.
A completely rewritten shadow catcher with indirect and environment light support, an option for lights to be included or excluded, and a new shadow catcher pass.
Subsurface scattering now supports anisotropy and index of refraction for Random Walk.
A new asset browser that supports drag and drop for Materials, Objects, and World datablocks.
Extended geometry nodes support with a re-imagined method for designing node groups, a new attribute system, around 100 new nodes for interaction with curves, text data, instances, and more.
Updated UI.
Support for thumbnails in the video sequencer as well as the ability to transform strips
New VR controller features including the ability to visualize controllers and the ability to navigate one’s way through a scene in VR using controller inputs.
A new pose library, integrated with the new asset browser
New modifiers in Grease Pencil plus a polished drawing experience, and Line Art performance improvements.
Improve file save and load times.
Support for importing USD files and improved Alembic support.
Plus much much more.