As part of [1]Blender continuing to build out the Vulkan API capabilities for this open-source 3D modeling software, a proof of concept merge request was opened for beginning to make use of Vulkan ray queries.

Blender developers are looking at making use of Vulkan ray queries in the future and as a first step toward that came up with a proof of concept implementation to replace workbench shadows with a ray query implementation.

This helped the Blender developers gain more insight into this Vulkan ray-tracing capability for performing ray geometry intersection tests directly within any shader stage as an alternative to Vulkan's ray-tracing pipelines.

This Vulkan ray query proof of concept was noted within the latest [2]viewport and EEVEE meeting .

The proof of concept ray queries implementation can be found within [3]this pull request .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Blender-5.0-Vulkan-Intel-Fail

[2] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/2025-10-13-viewport-eevee-module-meeting/42896

[3] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/146142