Practical Info
This is a weekly video chat meeting for planning and discussion of Blender Viewport & EEVEE module development. Any contributor (developer, UI/UX designer, writer, …) working on Viewport & EEVEE 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: 17 March 2025, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2025-03-17T10:30:00Z → 2025-03-17T11:00:00Z)
Attendees
- Clement
- Jeroen
- Miguel
Blender 4.4
Release is in a good state. Most high severity issue are related to 4.5.
Intel drivers
There is an driver bug in Intel that effects any recent Blender version on both discrete and integrated GPUs. Intel is working on fixing the drivers as we cannot work around it. It can take some time before the drivers are in the hands of our users. We will keep track of the issues via developer.projects.org.
Users not using Cycles or using an older Blender release might can downgrade their driver to the previous version.
Shader compilation
[#135406 - GPU: Thread-safe GPUShader implementation - blender - Blender Projects] Documents a new design that will solve shader compilation thread safety issues. The design requires some clarity before starting implementation.
Code of GPU materials are being cleaned up. Currently it still rely on batch compilation. When disabling multithread all shader compilation is blocking. This limitation should be removed. We discussed an idea is to replace the shader batch compilation with a parameter when creating shaders. “Compile this shader and it can be deferred”. More investigation is still needed.
Subdivision
[#133716 - OpenSubDiv: Metal + Vulkan - blender - Blender Projects] GPU subdivision has been refactored to use GPU module directly. It has been validated that OpenGL & Metal are working, Vulkan requires some tweaks to loose geometry as this part used a part of the API isn’t implemented.
[#135628 - SubDiv: Enable GPU subdivision on Metal - blender - Blender Projects] Metal enablement is expected to land soon. Afterwards cleanups and documentation will be worked on.
Vulkan will get a workaround so we can enable it. Knowing the limitation that loose geoemtry will be slow and requires more work before releasing 4.5.