I tried setting Vulkan as the backend for a while to see if there’s a difference, and for the most part, there is not.
Except here and there, where and its generally worse. For example the text editor is very laggy and I dont get as many dispatches per second on compute shaders as with opengl.
How is Vulkan behaving for you guys?
Vulkan in 4.5 official is not near as developed or as optimized as in the 5.0 alpha builds, so if you want to see where it is all headed then grab a buildbot build.
There has been a lot of work since then such as (finally) having some form of proper instance rendering for things like object scattering.
Uhm, so I downloaded 5.0 alpha and I am actually getting more performance out of Opengl with it. but at least they fixed the laggy text editor.
This is my performances comparison with 4.5 :
Basically on simpler scenes the performances are better, and it tends to deteriorate on complex scenes.
However, I also tested the blender barbershop scene (8 Millions tris / 1800 Objects) and got similar performances between OGL and Vulkan.
So it’s hard to tell what’s going on, hopefully it’s likely to be optimized over time even though it’s unclear to me if this is currently planned.
AFAIK it should be the other way around - Vulcan should perform better the more stuff is going on.
Vulcan performing better or worse - the experiences people are sharing appear to be all over the freaking place, and very much based on specifically what they are doing in their scenes.
And the answer always comes back to “They are still developing it, and we’re hoping it will get better, and they hope it will too.”
So maybe we should all wait until blender has declared publicly “we are done working on it to the best of our ability, and believe everything should be fast in every way.”
And then ask the question again, if Vulcan is better or worse.
At this point, these Vulcan threads are starting to feel like a kid in the back of the car continually asking “are we there yet?”…
Well they stated that this is a first implementation where the initial goal was to have it working, which I suppose is already quite challenging in itself.
I bet they are currently looking into stabilizing and polishing the integration to eventually look into optimizations.
I think some people tend to advertise it as a finished integration but it’s really just a step in the process like with many stuff in blender things append incrementally.
Anyway, it’s hard to tell where they are at currently, and when they see Vulkan integration finished if it’s not a continuous integration where performances will get better releases after releases…
Vulkan by its nature though is significantly more complex in terms of getting started with it (so you have a slower start compared to writing OpenGL code), and in addition there may be another layer of complexity at the moment due to OpenGL still being maintained and the API having to support both.
Considering that OpenGL is no longer seeing major development, Vulkan is the only guarantee that the BF has to continue to be able to use the latest in what GPU drivers have to offer in terms of features and fixes, as switching to DirectX would obviously not be an option and rolling their own graphics from scratch is not viable. To an extend their hand is forced here considering discussions in the past of preferring OpenGL.
There actually have been recent major advancements in optimization for cases like the rendering of large numbers of instances (now considered to be significantly faster than using OpenGL).
So what?
Flying an airplane is more complicated than walking.
That doesn’t mean that air travel is a bad idea, but let’s wait to get on the freaking plane and discuss how great the flight was, after the pilot tells us that they know how to fly it and we should expect no collision with the ground.
As someone who is trying to learn how code graphics from scrach. I have to say, its easy to tell a plane is better than walking, but only of youre the passenger. From the perspective of the people building the plane however…
Lets also not forget that its less like comparing walking vs flying and more like comparing building a regular plane vs building a VTOL.
One (maybe the only?) significant improvement I noticed is shader compilation, in a test scene with quite a few 4K textures, and even more so with EEVEE raytracing enabled. When changing raytracing settings in OGL the shaders would recompile every time, with a noticeable delay, while shader compilation in Vulkan was done once and cached.
That was 4.5. I haven’t tested 5.0 yet.
The main goal of switching to Vulkan is to have future proof code, as OpenGL is no longer in development. Vulkan is not meant to give performance improvement, at least not now.
Other than that im using a 4090 and i saw huge improvement in shaver compilation, i dont think twice before doing material preview anymore.
Did you think twice before Vulcan? 