The Still Very Early State Of Vulkan For Blender - No Active Developers Working On It

While there has been talk and plans for Vulkan API support within Blender, currently there are no active developers working on it and much work remains before it would be ready for end-users.

A new status report was issued today concerning the Vulkan API integration for Blender. Vulkan support for Blender will eventually come due to OpenGL no longer being a focus and all the problems there, but much work remains especially due to the Vulkan API being lower-level than OpenGL and the lack of developer manpower currently for the daunting task.

Going back to Blender 2.8 with the Draw Manager has been prerequisites made for eventually accommodating Vulkan. Additionally, going back two years all of the Blender and GPU communication was abstracted to better handle multiple GPU back-ends. But the actual work on writing a GPU Vulkan back-end is what lays ahead.

The status update today notes, "Although this doesn’t seems to be a lot of work. Please keep in mind that you need to write 10 times more lines of code than OpenGL to display a triangle on the screen. And in case of executing this for Blender you won’t be able to see any pixels, until the final phase of the project."

So per today's status report, it's still going to be a long road ahead before a Vulkan back-end is written and ready for this open-source 3D modeling software.

Meanwhile debuting this week is Blender 3.3 with improvements to the ROCm HIP back-end, the initial Intel oneAPI back-end for Intel Arc Graphics dGPU acceleration, and many other enhancements to these vendor-specific back-ends.