First off: I am relatively renew to Blender. I have an older version that I “put-down” for several years. I have been relearning what I forgot. My version is 2.2
Now should I go up to the 3.1a (newest version right?)?
Is raytracing in it really spectacular?
Thanks for the input!
not called 3.1a but 2.31a
yeah, why not? many bugs are gone, speed is better, on and on…even raytracing, able to animatie radiosity…and themebased UI with colours and all…
NLA (that’s from 2.25), Sound mixing in sequence editor, more image formats, knife tool, loop selection, loop cutting, …
Martin
new GUI… 
Support for more file formats, and audio synching [!]
That’s only about 2 years ago man! Quit making me feel so old! 
Welcome back! Shouldn’t take that long for you to figure out the new features. Most of the the major changes are pretty recent so they’re still fairly new to us as well. You might want to have a look at the change logs. And the new online Docs: http://download.blender.org/documentation/html/
It’s only in an “un official” version. You can get a compiled copy here.
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14924&sid=20e9126a9c57384e1fd6a800d8a05311.
It’s relatively simple at the moment but it’s developing fast and it’s fully integrated. What we have right now is based on Ton’s original ray tracer “Traces” which people have been wanting to have in Blender for years. And now we do. 
They’re also working on some sort of improved integration with Yafray, a more developed open source raytracer, and Renderman export.
ok, I downloaded it and installed it (version with raytracing). Thanks for the input!
(sorry I made you feel old, 2 years just seems like so long ago! 
)