Blender Planning Vulkan Support This Year, Other Exciting Improvements

Blender has an exciting year still ahead with a road-map they just published that does include Vulkan API support.

Among the ongoing and planned improvements for this open-source 3D modeling software for this calendar year includes work on their asset browser, continuing to replace their old animation proxy system, continuing to expand upon Blender's geometry nodes, Vulkan support, improving the grease pencil, continuing to enhance the Cycles engine, a USD importer thanks to NVIDIA, and working on the Blender 3.0 user-interface.

When it comes to Blender's Vulkan work, in current form it's about transitioning their drawing back-end to support Vulkan and in turn helping EEVEE more memory efficient. They do not expect any immediate performance benefits from the initial transition. Hopefully they continue building upon this Vulkan support in a timely manner.

Some of the other work still being evaluated for possibly tackling this year includes dynamic particles, collection modes, restrictive overrides, and mesh editing optimizations.

Blender 3.0 is aiming for release in Q3, most likely for September.

The new Blender 2021 road-map can be found over on code.blender.org.