While there was previously talk of Blender 5.0 likely defaulting to using the Vulkan API for rendering but keeping the OpenGL driver around, those plans look like they may be changing. OpenGL-by-default looks to now be on the table for Blender 5.0 due out later this year.
Blender 4.5 recently shipped with good Vulkan rendering support and the hope was that for Blender 5.0 that Vulkan support could be enabled by default on capable systems. But testing is showing some users are running into memory-related issues that may punt back the default change.
Mentioned today in the Blender Viewport/EEVEE module meeting minutes is that Vulkan is now not expected to be the default back-end for Blender 5.0:
“It is not expected that Vulkan will become the default backend in Blender 5.0. The reason is that OpenGL drivers are able to offload GPU memory to CPU RAM. Vulkan being a low level API doesn’t. Reports have been coming in that more users face this limitation and that we need to solve it.
There are multiple ways how to solve it and with their own draw-backs. We want to experiment upcoming week with sparse memory. According to the Vulkan specs it allows to replace the GPU memory behind a handle (image or buffer) using a queue command. When this happens we could split the render graph and perform the uploading/synchronization that are needed.”
It’s too bad to hear that Vulkan-by-default might not happen now for Blender 5.0 but in any event hopefully their Vulkan sparse memory efforts will pay off. The Vulkan support can be easily enabled on Blender 4.5 and newer for those wanting to opt-in to using it.
With Blender 5.0 will also be HDR support on Linux with Vulkan and Wayland. Blender 5.0 is expected to be released in mid-November.
