2024-09-02 EEVEE/Viewport Module Meeting

Meetings
1

Practical Info

This is a weekly video chat meeting for planning and discussion of Blender EEVEE/viewport module development. Any contributor (developer, UI/UX designer, writer, …) working on EEVEE/viewport in Blender is welcome to join.

For users and other interested parties, we ask to read the meeting notes instead so that the meeting can remain focused.

  • Google Meet

  • Next Meeting: 9 September 2023, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2024-09-09T09:30:00Z → 2024-09-09T10:00:00Z)

Attendees

  • Clement
  • James
  • Jeroen
  • Miguel

EEVEE

Many issues have been fixed and backported to 4.2 release.

EEVEE has some issues with running on Legacy GPUs. It is hard to reproduce on developer systems due to not having the exact same GPU/driver combination. We might need to drop some platforms as these just contain to many bugs that cannot be worked around or takes to much engineering time. Which one and when to revoke support is still under discussion as more factors are in play.

Overlay-next

Project is around 80-90% finished. The complex overlays are done. Plan is to merge soon.

Some performance regressions have been detected during development related to using a few main passes. The performance regressions improves workbench as well,. Some refactoring should be done to be able to do better GPU scheduling.

We prioritize features before performance. The overlay engine targets 4.4 for its initial release so there is still time to improve the performance after implementing the features.

Metal

There are several high priority bugs for Metal when running on AMD or Intel hardware. During the meeting we discussed how we could handle those. We will be looking into the download statistics in order to make decisions.

Open Subdivision support for Metal is being developed. The current Blender part of the implementation is tight to OpenGL and isn’t updated with the way when we added cross compilation to Metal. Other changes are needed on Blender side to improve OpenSubDiv integration.

Vulkan

Last few weeks many stabilization improvements have been made to the Vulkan backend and we need to decide if the Vulkan backend will become part of the 4.3 release (still as an experimental option).

  • Release notes needs to be written to explain what is expected.
  • Backend selection option will be hidden behind the developer extra option.
  • When Vulkan cannot be initialized Blender should switch automatically to OpenGL and inform the user.
22 Likes
2

Please, keep support for GT1030.

1 Like
3

Agree with person above, please keep support for GeForce GT 740M and beyond, at least until blender 5.0, where it will be fine to break compatibility.

4

By whom? If possible, it would be helpful sometime if these meeting notes contain links so others could follow along, help, or provide feedback.

6 Likes
5

NVIDIA on OpenGL isn’t a problem and will be supported as is. However for the vulkan backend we might want to bump it to GTX900 series.

5 Likes
6

But yeah will add links to the notes when possible. In this case sadly it is still early in development in a non-public branch as developments are done by Apple.

3 Likes