With the release of Blender 4.3 last November an experimental Vulkan back-end was added and it continues to be improved upon for modernizing this 3D creation suite for digital artists and serving a variety of other purposes. The upcoming Blender 4.4 release will further refine the Vulkan support while later in the year it should be reaching production readiness.
Jeroen Bakker with the Blender Institute presented at the Vulkanised 2025 conference last month in Edinburgh (UK) around the Vulkan API use by this popular open-source, cross-platform 3D creation software.
The Vulkan performance out of Blender is looking much better than OpenGL with a cold start of Blender with a large scene going from 1.52 seconds with OpenGL down to 0.59 seconds with Vulkan… Or even as little as 0.06 seconds with a multi-threaded cold start.
With this month’s Blender 4.4 release the Vulkan performance will be better and more mature than the code found in Blender 4.3. Blender developers hope with Blender 4.5 LTS in the middle of the year there will be working OpenXR, HDR, and other improvements and the Vulkan back-end will have matured enough that it’s no longer considered experimental. But Blender 4.5 LTS will continue defaulting to OpenGL. The plan for Blender 5.0 due out in November is to make the Vulkan back-end by default but keeping around the OpenGL back-end for those that want the legacy support.
More details on the Vulkan API back-end for Blender via the Vulkanised 2025 presentation embedded above along with the PDF slides.