Hey Mac users! Dalai Felinto said in the Blender Today this week that Vulcan (in rudimentary form) will be committed this year! That means that that maybe some of us OpenCl users will be able to actually use our gpus by the end pf 2121!
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I’m not sure what this has to do with Mac. The Mac has no official Vulkan support and MoltenVK is still lacking a good deal of base API and extension support.
This is great news for a Blender UI and Eevee performance (also for hypothetical Mac MoltenVK version). I’m affraid it has nothing to do with Cycles which will be stuck with Nvidia and CUDA crap (yeah - multiplatform software…).
Vulkan will do nothing for performance. Vulkan is only faster than OpenGL when the bottleneck is the OpenGL driver, for a DCC there are bigger bottlenecks that limit performance long before the OpenGL driver is the issue.
Can anyone cite any serious application using MoltenVK? I anticipate Mac users clutching onto the hypothetical MoltenVK in hope for years…
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As I understand it Molten VK Is the only way I’ll be able to have Blender recognize my GPU. I for one will take that over a proprietary Nvidia solution. I have the advantage of not being dependent on and chasing the latest and fastest. Having access to the GPU I have had is still good news.
And you are correct it isn’t about Cycles or the latest performance increases, it is about maintaining open source as a component of competition…and that should be welcomed by everyone one regardless of need, goals or desires.
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This is still a good sign for Blender. Yes this is only useful for the windows display system and not Cycles - but still.
Vulcan for eeVee can have many benefits.
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You can always tell when someone isn’t a developer when they call CUDA crap
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I heard somewhere that we need Vulkan to get RTX raytracing in Eevee. Imagine raytraced AO and reflections in Eevee, can’t wait. I’ll test Unreal Engine in the meantime.
Vulkan would need generic raytracing bindings before that could happen
Vulkan has nothing to do with the kind of rendering you’re thinking about
What does that mean in laymen’s terms?
So RTX raytracing could be done right now in OpenGL? Then what are we waiting for? 
You can do ray tracing in Vulkan: https://github.com/GPSnoopy/RayTracingInVulkan/releases
I don’t see why a version for EEVEE won’t be possible?They are even giving a talk about Vulkan ray tracing in games at this year GDC next month.
Vulkan raytracing right now is done via language extensions. The big players in graphics are meeting to make it a proper part of the specification. No work should be done until that happens, but even then, Eevee and the windowing system will have to be completely rewritten before any of this is useful to Blender users.
That’s not good advice at all. The Vulkan API development is done by first adding a feature as an extension, this feature is then able to be used by developers, if the feature is used then Khronos make it part of the core Vulkan API.
There’s nothing stopping anyone getting on and using the Ray tracing extensions if they want to, in fact, Khronos encourage it. But there’s lots of work to convert a basic viewport to Vulkan let alone do Eevee.
I suspect the switch to Vulkan will mean Eevee will be a completely different beast and allow a start from a blank piece of paper.
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2121?
I think by then it’s more likely to have blender installed directly on your brain .and render on your imagination neurones lol
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once we have 1 to 1 feature parity in vulkan they can wrap ATAA in EVEE and RTX as fallback for SSR and even DLSS.
DLSS + GPU armature skinning and we are looking at 60 fps at 4k for playblasts / UPBGE on modern hardware.
DLSS alone merits the switch.
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That would be so beautiful. Smooth playback. It’s a distant memory now.