Why Blender Changing to Vulkan is Groundbreaking

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MichaelKlint@reddit

It's so weird, everyone is singing the praises of Vulkan, and yet Vulkan is so great that in the first big release of the working Vulkan renderer, they decided to default to OpenGL.

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Stefen_007@reddit

Will this improve amd card render times in blender?

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moofunk@reddit

No. This is for viewport rasterization with among other things, EEVEE, not for final render with Cycles.

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JustBeLikeAndre@reddit

does this mean a better experience while modeling for AMD users? Can we expect improvements in render times in the future ?

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moofunk@reddit

As said, this is for viewport, not for final render. AMD users might experience better performance in the viewport, but I'd confirm that via their tests or simply by trying it out in Blender 4.4.

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Well, I can confirm that my crappy laptop with AMD integrated graphics / APU (Just testing for fun, I have an actual workstation PC with a high end Nvidia GPU for actually using Blender) could not run viewport rendering / lighting before. It appeared with visual artifacts and weird jaggy errors. Now works perfectly fine with vulkan, and has a notable performance increase in general use.

Previously, I would've said Blender was unusable on this fairly low end laptop. Now, it's actually quite usable for small models and even presenting them.

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moofunk@reddit

OpenGL drivers would often really suck on low end hardware. Glad to hear things are much better now.

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JapariParkRanger@reddit

No

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DM_Me_Linux_Uptime@reddit

It's not as important as the video makes out to be, and the video can be titled "OpenGL vs Vulkan" because 90% of it is explaining the difference between them.

You get a boost to cold start times because of multithreaded shader compile, that, and the removal of the 24 textures per material limit (which the video doesn't mention), and depending on how well its implemented, possibly lower VRAM use and slightly faster rendering in EEVEE (the non-pathtraced renderer).

However, a huge chunk of Blender's workflow performance is still very single threaded geometry and mesh deformation bound. Posing a rig is slow because of CPU limitations of Blender rather than anything to do with the graphics API. The pathtraced renderer that most people use for final renders uses Compute API's and will see no benefit from it. Also a huge chunk of Blender's UI uses Python, which is again very single threaded.

What it does enable is potentially enabling EEVEE to use Vulkan RT extensions to allow RTGI and RT reflections similar to games to the rasterized renderer in the future. (something the video also doesn't mention).

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DM_Me_Summits_In_UAE@reddit

What is the craziest uptime you have received?

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DM_Me_Linux_Uptime@reddit

Just today actually, of 171 days. Only 2 have ever DM'ed me their uptime. 👀

I always update and reboot the remote server that runs my website every 3 or so months, and I personally live in an area with many power failures so getting high uptime personally is impossible.

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FoxxMD@reddit

RemindMe! 30 days

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FoxxMD@reddit

One of my servers is at 143 days uptime. I'll DM you when it breaks your record.

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BFBooger@reddit

Pffft.

# uptime
15:29:58 up 2417 days, 3:50, 1 user, load average: 0.95, 0.80, 0.85

Ive got some network-silo'd old servers just doing their thing over in the corner, waiting to be replaced later this year and recycled.

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g1aiz@reddit

Friends of mine had a server with crazy uptime of a few years and they had to move it so they actually cut open the AC wire to connect a UPS to it as it didn't have one initially. They were part of the CCC though.

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Blacky-Noir@reddit

Yup, the video also talks about "API" like they are this magical always graphical thing...

It reads a bit like someone paraphrasing a press release.

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Tommy_TQ@reddit

AVE SMART PEOPLE!

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PeakHippocrazy@reddit

I swear to god I saw this same comment (or similar) on a post on this sub a while ago, like deja vu. I think it was also opengl vs vulkan in that thread but I might be wrong

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512bitinstruction@reddit

Vulkan already revolutionized Linux gaming. It is now also revolutionizing LLM inference on consumer hardware.

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Kataroku@reddit

This video was terrible. Dude has no idea what a graphics API is.

Then he goes on to say that OpenGL is ancient / outdated because it came out in 1992, despite OpenGL version 4.6 being released in 2017.

Couldn't sit through the rest of it.

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Framed-Photo@reddit

..... blender was on opengl?

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waxwayne@reddit

Exactly but they are claiming they are cutting edge.

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pi-by-two@reddit

I'm pretty sure even Maya is using OpenGL for their viewport rendering. The actual production renderers (RenderMan, Cycles, Arnold) all use CUDA/OpenCL backends.

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Pokiehat@reddit

OpenGL is at the very least an option for fast 3D viewport rendering in literally every 3D package I use. Add Substance Designer to the list - your only options are OpenGL (fast) and iRay (slow).

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PM_ME_SQUANCH@reddit

Houdini, top of the heap, only made Vulkan the default for the viewport in the latest release. Vulkan isn’t common for cg viewports at all

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WJMazepas@reddit

A lot of stuff is still on OpenGL

Vulkan is hard!

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sascharobi@reddit

Vulkan isn't hard. It just doesn't have any priority.

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WJMazepas@reddit

Then why did i cried like a baby when I was having difficulties just showing a triangle?

Checkmate liberal 😎

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slither378962@reddit

Yes, it's the most painful experience in your life. Especially if you just want D3D11 but portable.

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DIYEconomy@reddit

NOW MAKE IT RENDER A LIBERAL!

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aminorityofone@reddit

Now i have an image in my head of a poorly rendered blue donkey sitting inside of 3 lines that almost touch at the top, close enough that you can see it should be a triangle, but isnt.

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ficiek@reddit

I mean anyone is free to contribute to blender if it's so easy if you catch my drift.

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glitchvid@reddit

Lots of CAD programs are still OpenGL exclusive, there's still a number of line rendering extensions that either aren't in Vulkan or have little support, for example.

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sascharobi@reddit

Sure, it's old but it works.

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DynamicStatic@reddit

The maker of that video do not seem to really understand what the purpose of an API is. He speaks as if you are using the API to talk to Blender but in reality you as a user interacts with Blender which uses a graphics API like Vulkan to talk to the hardware. I feel like this videos script was written using ChatGPT.

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PM_ME_SQUANCH@reddit

Blender users are famously not very aware of what they’re talking about (speaking from his Houdini ivory tower)

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tomz17@reddit

Content-less engagement spam video... The video's author blows it on the first chart, where he didn't even bother to read the label (cold start is in seconds)

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schneeb@reddit

lost me at the weird mcdonalds metaphor... that is not a useful comparison lol

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trejj@reddit

"This year Blender is transitioning to Vulkan."

"This is ground breaking technology and Blender is at the cutting edge."

Vulkan was released in February 2016. 🙄

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DM_Me_Linux_Uptime@reddit

See dumb comment on /r/hardware.

Look inside

PCMR poster

Every single time.

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moofunk@reddit

Implementing Vulkan style APIs was not possible until Blender 2.8 in 2019, and still afterwards, lots of internal reorganization was necessary to accommodate Vulkan data structures. It took 4 more years to get to an experimental release that was extremely buggy and missed many features. Now, 2 years later, it's starting to look ready.

The Vulkan code base for Blender vs. the OpenGL one is 10x larger.

TL;DR: Coding for performance and for modern GPUs is hard and time consuming.

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sascharobi@reddit

It's not but it's a good decision.

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shugthedug3@reddit

Vulkan, everyone's favourite API.

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moops__@reddit

Vulkan is really awful to work with

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Positive-Bonus5303@reddit

i love the program. If they could only stop ruining key elements of the UI that completely trashes users muscle memories... Sure they over the user to use the 'old interface', but not really. It's the old interface 'as far as the new gui supports it'.

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Jacko10101010101@reddit

when will it be default ?