[HN Gopher] Why Blender Changing to Vulkan Is Groundbreaking [vi...
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       Why Blender Changing to Vulkan Is Groundbreaking [video]
        
       Author : mdtrooper
       Score  : 18 points
       Date   : 2025-06-01 21:05 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
        
       | mdp2021 wrote:
       | Abridgement - made by this poster, not automated - over the
       | transcript:
       | 
       | > _This year, Blender is transitioning to Vulkan, which marks one
       | of the biggest performance boosts in its history: we're talking
       | about a leap from a cold start time of a minute 52 to opening
       | Blender in 6 seconds. // Vulkan ... simply put, it's the industry
       | standard API. [...] Blender's current API is OpenGL, which has
       | some major flaws. OpenGL ... really struggles using multi-core
       | CPUs. // OpenGL ... automatically sets up most low-level features
       | like memory management, synchronization, and hardware
       | interactions. ... But high-level APIs come with a huge trade-off:
       | they're slow. // Writing code that performs better in Vulkan is a
       | difficult task ... OpenGL is like infinitely easier than Vulkan.
       | Vulkan ... is a low-level API. [...] Vulkan can perform up to 18
       | times better on certain tasks. [...] For tasks that heavily rely
       | on the UI, we will see a much more performant system. [...]
       | Essentially, interactions between the user and the program will
       | be much faster, but the underlying automatic system will not see
       | a direct speed increase from Vulkan. ... While I would love for
       | my final render to be faster, I would much prefer to have a
       | performant viewport that's more stable and faster, which is what
       | we'll have with Vulkan. But this is not the only thing it brings
       | to the table. Many corporate sponsors have granted money to
       | Blender primarily for a Vulkan integration. AMD is donating
       | $120,000 per year to help fund Blender's transition to Vulkan. _
        
       | poisonborz wrote:
       | This is a rather bad intro to a great topic, the comments point
       | out a trove of errors and false parallels in the video.
        
         | sureglymop wrote:
         | Ouch, that video was painful. But the comments are great. I'm
         | glad there are _humans_ that try to make others aware of the
         | issues there.
        
       | an_aparallel wrote:
       | I hate seeing how awesome Blender...free software is..in
       | comparison to roughly $5k a seat program like Revit who's
       | graphics rendering looks like it comes from a 90s shareware
       | floppy disk.
        
       | neilv wrote:
       | Recent Blender versions have OpenGL version dependencies and VRAM
       | requirements that aren't supported on a lot of older PCs.
       | 
       | For fans of, say, older laptops that have "mechanical" keyboards,
       | I wonder whether Vulkan will re-enable support for the latest
       | Blender.
       | 
       | (Though the VRAM might still be a problem. As will local
       | rendering of expensive animations.)
        
       | kvark wrote:
       | Shipping Vulkan in production on Linux is a challenge. Chrome was
       | dealing with it for a while. Recently, with Zed ported to Vulkan,
       | we saw the variety of half-broken platforms and user
       | configurations.
       | 
       | I'd recommend Blended to not close the door on OpenGL and instead
       | keeping it as a compatibility fallback.
        
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       (page generated 2025-06-01 23:00 UTC)