While the Blender 5.0 3D modeling software is being released next month, there is already exciting changes to look forward to with Blender 5.1 in the new year. Beyond AMD HIP-RT ray-tracing by default in Blender 5.1, this follow-on Blender release is also planning on enabling Vulkan API support by default.
During this week’s Blender Viewport and EEVEE meeting, the developers reaffirmed plans to switch to Vulkan by default for Blender 5.1. Blender 5.1 stable is expected in mid-March while now through early February is the alpha period followed by the month long beta period.
Vulkan support in Blender 5.0 is in fairly good shape for those wanting to try it in place of OpenGL while for Blender 5.1 they are expecting it will be ready to switch to that modern graphics API by default. Previously there was hope of Vulkan by default for Blender 5.0 but that didn’t work out. Blender Vulkan tests have been passing for AMD and NVIDIA but failing on Intel hardware/drivers.
One of their most recent initiatives around Vulkan is this ticket for tracking improvements to parallel shader compilation. Hopefully those improvements will be baked in time for Blender 5.1.
Blender developers also added GPU workers last week to help in testing and ensuring platform parity across GPU vendors and operating systems.
See the meeting notes for more of their viewport and EEVEE plans for Blender 5.1.
