Blender 4.4: EEVEE & Viewport¶

3D Viewport¶

Overlays¶

The overlays have been rewritten for better consistency and better extendability.

This is the cause of small changes in the way overlays are drawn:

• Objects origins now always draw on top of edit mode overlays.
• Display in Xray mode now fade in-front overlays correctly.
• The Wire Color option under the Viewport Shading popover is now honored by all wire objects in both Solid and Wireframe shading mode.
• Wireframes are now displayed in Edit Mode even when Overlays are off. (5ccc02bbf4)

User Interface¶

• Expose view Lock Rotation property in the sidebar View panel. (7d98a24e3e)

Vulkan¶

The Vulkan experimental backend received a big update in performance, stability and compatibility. The backend is still considered experimental due to missing features like OpenXR, OpenSubdiv, Hydra viewport and animation performance.

Performance¶

Startup Time¶

Test: Start Blender, open barbershop_interior.blend (3000 objects, 550 materials, 200 images), wait for final viewport.

The next figures shows the compilation times in second using NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 on a AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (32-Core).

For OpenGL the default behavior is to use no subprocesses.

xychart-beta horizontal
    title "Cold Start"
    x-axis ["OpenGL (no subprocesses)", "OpenGL (8 subprocesses)", "Vulkan"]
    y-axis "Time (in seconds)" 0 --> 120
    bar [112, 56, 30]

xychart-beta horizontal
    title "Warm Start"
    x-axis ["OpenGL (no subprocesses)", "OpenGL (8 subprocesses)",  "Vulkan"]
    y-axis "Time (in seconds)" 0 --> 10
    bar [6, 6, 3]

Cycles Render¶

Vulkan is used for displaying the rendered result of Cycles. The process has been reimplemented using a new threading model resulting in the same performance compared to OpenGL.

Compatibilty¶

Vulkan has been tested to work on the next platforms and drivers.

Known Issues¶

• Windows + NVIDIA: Opening preferences twice leads to a crash (#134928)

Profiling¶

There's a new --gpu-profile command line argument that exports GPU and CPU profiling data (Docs).