How will Vulkan replace openGL in Blender in the near future?

[BeerBaron]

@BluePrintRandom

that is why you socket the render, and do marginal improvements over time to vulkan render, while the vast majority still use openGL. Maybe vulkan starts with 95% of features disabled, and as they are working, turn em on. The important bit is to seperate the function so that you can add to the new system and maintain the old systems at the same time.

The problem is, how do you abstract two very different APIs (Vulkan and OpenGL) without losing the benefits of either? This is neither a small nor simple task.

Particularly, I don’t think it’s a good idea to task inexperienced GSOC students with this, because that didn’t really pan out in the past and Vulkan is even harder to use than modern OpenGL.

I believe it would be better to investigate integration of an external abstraction layer like bgfx, which is already optimized for drawcall throughput on many legacy APIs.