In a significant move to advance its graphics processing capabilities, Blender has begun testing Vulkan as an experimental backend, now available in alpha builds for Linux and Windows users. Vulkan, a contemporary API offering an efficient, cross-platform approach to GPU use, is set to replace OpenGL, which has been Blender’s graphics standard since the 1990s.
The transition reflects industry evolution, with OpenGL’s development slowing as Vulkan’s ecosystem, complete with tools and a vendor-neutral collaborative approach, becomes the focal point. The change is expected to address longstanding issues with OpenGL’s varied implementation by different GPU vendors and driver complexity.
Blender aims to use Vulkan to unlock new graphics features such as hardware ray tracing and support for HDRI displays, which OpenGL no longer supports. The migration also promises improvements in Blender’s viewport performance and compute tasks, like texture painting, leveraging the modern capabilities of GPUs.
The Blender development team is actively working on the Vulkan backend and encourages the community to participate in the testing phase. The goal is to ensure Blender’s compatibility with as many devices as possible, emphasizing support for Vulkan 1.2 specifications.
Updates on this development and how to assist are available on Blender’s devtalk forum.
It looks like it is on the right path to updating old things.
As opposed to what? Downgrade new thing?! -.-
As opposed to keeping old outdated things in the software, which unfortunately happens quite often. There’s no need to be passive aggresive.
A handsome update to be sure!
It’s important to understand that Vulan implementation it’s in its early stages, it lacks many things and it’s unstable right now, and performance its not the best AFAIK, other than that, its great 🙂