With the recent release of [1]Blender 4.4 it brought many improvements to its Vulkan back-end but is still being treated as experimental. But [2]they hope to make their Vulkan renderer production-ready this year and in order to do that they need more help from the community in testing it.

Blender is encouraging interested users to test out the Vulkan back-end using current Blender 4.5 alpha builds. Blender developers are working on validating the Vulkan back-end to become an officially supported back-end and most recently they have been focusing on enhancing the performance of it.

[3]

With this currently-experimental back-end, Vulkan is used rather than OpenGL for drawing the user interface and EEVEE handling. This change though isn't about using the Vulkan API for the Cycles engine.

Those interested in testing out the current Vulkan back-end within Blender 4.5 development builds can learn more about the current state and call for feedback via [4]devtalk.blender.org .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Blender-4.4-Released

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Blender-Vulkan-Exciting-2025

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=blender_45_vulkan_lrg

[4] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/vulkan-feedback-and-testing/39900