Blender 5.0 is working its way toward an official release in mid-November and is soon transitioning from its alpha to beta stage. Among the key changes with Blender 5.0 are its Vulkan renderer being in good shape overall, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other enhancements. Today some brief details were shared around the current state of the Vulkan support for Blender 5.0.
While the Vulkan back-end is very promising for Blender, for the upcoming Blender 5.0 release this summer they decided it will likely still default to using OpenGL rather than Vulkan but users can easily switch if they want to enjoy this modern graphics API.
In an update on the latest Blender Viewport and EEVEE meeting, they shared that Vulkan render tests are passing for the NVIDIA and AMD drivers on both Windows and Linux. But the Intel drivers are still failing at these Vulkan render tests with Blender. So it’s still being discussed among Blender stakeholders when to at least enable Vulkan on NVIDIA and AMD graphics hardware/drivers.
Another item being looked at by Blender developers is for enhancing the text rendering performance. For that as of today is now a pull request to add streaming buffers for the Vulkan back-end to hopefully help with the text rendering performance.
Blender developers are also concerned of some users still mentioning the Vulkan back-end being slower than OpenGL. Since it could be from workflows the developers are unaware of, they are hoping for more reports from users that do find Vulkan being slower than OpenGL to actually report it to the developers so it can be properly analyzed.
More details for those interested via this Blender DevTalk thread.
