Is Anyone else having severe problems with Blender 4.1-Alpha's "EEVEE-Next"?

Support Lighting and Rendering
,
1

So, I recently downloaded Blender 4.1 alpha just to try out the new version of EEVEE called EEVEE-Next… but it has been plainly UNUSABLE on my device.

While using the Viewport in render mode, the moment I switch the render engine from Cycles/Eevee to EEVEE-Next, the entire program would suddenly lag so badly that the entire program would effectively grind to a halt, until I switch back to one of the previous render engines.

and that’s just with the startup scene with the default cube and singular light! but the moment I try to do anything even slightly more complicated than that (for instance, adding a HDRI)… BOOM. The entire program would crash then and there.

I thought that disabling the realtime raytracing would sort of fix the problem… but that didn’t change a thing.

Does anyone have any hint on why these problems are happening? Is it that my system (Intel Core I5 8250U, 8GB RAM) is too weak to handle this? or is the current Alpha implementation of EEVEE-Next simply isn’t optimized for my kind of device yet?

if it’s the latter, then I hope that the devs fix it up in time for the final release.

Buit if it’s the former (my system being weak), then that could be bad, because if the devs go through with their promise of completely discarding the old EEVEE in favour of this one, then that could mean bye-bye realtime rendering for me. I hope this isn’t the case.

2

It’s still in alpha, so problems are to be expected?

4 Likes
3

Is a 6 year old CPU with a below average onboard GPU.
I wouldn’t say it is too weak, but it certainly is far removed from the other end of the spectrum.
I’d say your problem is a mixture of all the problems you have mentioned.
I wouldn’t count that machine out, but I wouldn’t be too optimistic about its potential performance either.
Right now, you have to be a little patient until Eevee Next is matured enough to make a final judgement.
It might probably work, but the increase in visual quality will come at the price of decreased performance.
All of this will also depend on the amount of data and complexity you’ll throw at it.

1 Like
4

The performance question was asked in the developer forum as well, here is the developer answer:

EEVEE-Next is still in alpha and performance will improve in the upcoming months. We are looking to optimizer the current effects and might introduce a quality change when playing back an animation or using older GPUs that aren’t optimized for compute intensive tasks.