Blender

Cycles:

• Cycles displacement cracks.jpg
• New shaders for texturing, denoising with OpenImageDenoise, and NVIDIA RTX support.

Eevee:

• Eevee2.81 transparent bsdf1.png
• Shadows, transparency and bump mapping redesigned for easier setup and better quality.

Viewport:

• Demonstrating Multi-layered Matcaps (Image from Pablo Dobarro).png
• New options for look development with Cycles and Eevee.

Grease Pencil:

• New Brushes.png
• User interface, tools, operators, modifiers, new brushes and presets and material self overlap.

Sculpt & Retopology:

• New sculpt tools, poly build tool, voxel remesh and quad remesh.

Transform & Snapping:

• Snap Perpendicular.png
• Transform origins, new snapping, mirroring and auto merge options.

User Interface:

• 2 81 file browser vertical list.png
• Outliner improvements, new file browser and batch rename.

Library Overrides:

• A new system to replace proxies, to make local overrides to linked characters and other data types.

Animation & Rigging:

• Finer control over rotations and scale in bones, constraints and drivers.

More Features:

• Alembic, audio & video output, library management and video sequencer editor.
• Python API
• Python version upgrade, dynamic tooltip for operators, new handlers and other API changes.

Add-ons:

• Enabled add-ons only, glTF, FBX, import images as planes, blenderkit, rigify among others.