The next major release of the open-source Blender graphics application is here, and it has a major new feature… Vulkan support. Vulkan will have a major impact on Blender, theoretically resulting in significant increases in EEVEE viewport performance, enabling larger scenes as well as improving shader processing. This will also result in improved file load times.
Vulkan needs to be enabled in the Edit->Preferences menu. Locate the System tab, then in the Display Graphics setting select Vulkan in the Backend. This will then require a reboot of Blender to become active.
There are several other improvements in Blender 4.5 in addition to the Vulkan support:
- the deprecation of Intel Mac and COLLADA file support
- Vulkan support has arrived
- Horizontal mouse scrolling
- UV and Image Editor support for UVMap display of multiple objects
- Customizable tabs in the Properties window
- Remove all materials
- Asset browser UI improvements
- File browser drag and drop of multiple files
- Geometry Nodes improvements ( drag and drop, Import file nodes, new normal node, node framing and more)
- Compositor node redesign to stay consistent to Geometry and Shader nodes.
- Apply Visual Geometry to Objects supports
- Broad exporter improvements (FBX, GLTF, etc)
Key Links
You can learn more about the Blender 4.5 release in the video below.