So today I updated my blender from 3.5.1 to 4.3 and what I noticed first is that Eevee is very VERY buggy and slow and sluggish now? It’s practically unusable. I tried opening some assets and it takes an awful lot of time to “compile” shaders and even when it does, everything just goes super slow and sluggish.
My computer has intel i9 12900k CPU, RTX 3060 12GB GPU, 64GB DDR5 RAM
I’m certain that it’s enough to run Eevee smoothly. It’s a shame how bad Eevee has become now. My entire workflow revolved around Eevee and now it’s basically useless. If someone can help me out with speeding it up so it’s as fluid and smooth as the 3.5 counterpart, it would be very a great help.
There was a complete rebuild of Eevee in 4.2 (Eevee next), it did indeed introduce some performance regressions, especially in shader compilation.
It did add in some improvements, and it laid the groundwork for even more improvements going forward, but it is currently pretty rough, especially in scenes with lots of materials.
The newest version without the changes is 4.1, download that one and stick to that for a while. The development team is aware of the many issues with Eevee next, and they are on the roadmap, but it will take some time to execute them.
In Blender 4.2, Eevee was completely rewritten. The new version is more realistic, but it has been criticized for being slower and lacking feature parity with old Eevee.
For the compilation time, there is an option in the preferences to decide the number of CPU threads used for it. Check how many you are using and increase if it’s at 1.
Are your scenes cell shaded or relying on “shader to rgb” in any way? That’s something the new Eevee doesn’t do well for now. If you are, I would stay in Blender 4.1 for now. There is a new workflow for that kind of rendering that’s being developped.
It is very underwhelming tbh. Many addons that I use didn’t carry forward to the newer version. I use Eevee because I’m a stylized artist and I make “anime” art. Eevee was so good for my workflow. I upgraded to 4.3 because I think I hit a ceiling with 3.5 when it comes to community and add-on support. They should have given an option to run older Eevee with Eevee next in the newer builds. Pushing Eevee with such slow features is not good. I rendered a small scene and it took 24 seconds to render in Eevee and cycles did it 21. I don’t even understand what was the need to screw up Eevee. Now even those who relied on Eevee because they had a less powerful PC can’t use it anymore.
That’s a shame so many new add-ons that would make my life so much better are being made with Eevee next in mind and I actually like the ray tracing options. But I have no choice:/
Blender is going to lose its reputation of being friendly with weaker hardware and newbies at this rate. Not everyone has a tanky PC that can handle everything and the NPR community as well. We basically depend on Eevee for our entire career and income. It’s sad to see that they don’t acknowledge this part of the community as much as they do for the large scale production and bigger artists stuff
Settle down, it a very well known issue and is being worked on.
In the meantime just keep using whatever version works for you. I have been using 3.6 daily because upgrading messes with my rigs and I don’t want to take unnecessary risks, and it’s alright.
I didn’t used it a lot but since you do anime stuff did you tried to disable raytracing ? Also IDK if it’s just an impression but I found that it needs less samples when rendering, but I didn’t tried with complex scene TBH.
Yeah that sound legit but I think they reached a point where it was nearly impossible to have both engine at the same time. It’s not the first time that they change some features a bit earlier than what would be reasonable and it can be frustrating but that’s also probably the best solution they found to move forward .
Well, it’s basically the same for everyone, they don’t particularly account for large scale production as they’re likely to use the same tools as you in the end
Even if most of the time updating blender is relatively safe and the only way to keep up with latest addons and such, especially for professionals it should be made very consciously, it’s what your business is depending on and each release comes with good stuff but also issues and stuff that broke especially on production files, and only you can decide what is the most beneficial move.
Beside that studios tend to stick to older version for way much longer than regular users and they manage to make awesome stuff with it anyway.
Even if it’s sad sometimes we have to stick to old stuff Anyway, if you haven’t yet you should look at the upcoming NPR engine, it’s a long road until it’s there but I’m sure you’re going to love that given what you do !
No real talk, if I just have to wait more and more then I can just get the goo engine. But it has shaders that I have relearn but at least they use the latest builds of blender and add to them, their own flavor of a custom Eevee build
Well, I think they stopped their engine at 4.1 since eevee next is too big of a change to include their fork. Or it would be a crazy amount of work to put back eevee into 4.2… They’re currently contributing stuff to eevee-next and even more on the upcoming NPR engine.
What features are you missing so badly in 4.1 that 4.2/4.3 has ?
Sure I get that, but is this currently blocking you to do some work ?
My point is, are you forced to use 4.2/4.3 and suffer with eevee-next ? or is it just more comfortable on the overall but eevee-next is a pain to use ?
At some point we obviously have to make a choice for the less painful blender version to use, I was just wondering if something in 4.1 would be particularly blocking to a point ones really should use 4.3.
Ok that makes sense ! It’s more the uncertainty of the future, and the fact that the more versions are getting out the more obsolete blender 4.1 become rather than a very particular issue that makes 4.1 quite difficult to work with, or something rather awesome that makes 4.3 stand very much out…
I’m wondering what is planned to improve Eevee, personally it’s more the compilation time that makes it a bit annoying. As for rendering time I didn’t dig into but I got the impression than by lowering samples or getting rid of raytracing it’s possible to get something relatively fast especially for stylized rendering …
Well that and bring back NPR possibilities, I do not use NPR but fully sympathize for those who do, luckily both are getting attention.
…Oh and nicer shadows would be welcome!
Yes , the NPR engine project is quite amazing , can’t wait to start using material nodes, geometry nodes, NPR and realtime compositing altogether !
it reminds me a bit of what was possible with blender internal but so much better !
Anyway, about performances I was wondering if there are stuff already planned, like they know some areas that can be optimized for sure but they preferred getting a first iteration before getting into that. Or on the contrary some area might be impossible to optimize for sure … stuff like that ?
From what I understand they are also switching to vulkan ? do you think this would bring a positive impact on performance ?
so many new add-ons that would make my life so much better are being made with Eevee next in mind and I actually like the ray tracing options. But I have no choice:/
and the NPR community as well. We basically depend on Eevee for our entire career and income. It’s sad to see that they don’t acknowledge this part of the community as much as they do for the large scale production and bigger artists stuff