Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

Abridgement - made by this poster, not automated - over the transcript:

> This year, Blender is transitioning to Vulkan, which marks one of the biggest performance boosts in its history: weʼre talking about a leap from a cold start time of a minute 52 to opening Blender in 6 seconds. // Vulkan ... simply put, itʼs the industry standard API. [...] Blenderʼs current API is OpenGL, which has some major flaws. OpenGL ... really struggles using multi-core CPUs. // OpenGL ... automatically sets up most low-level features like memory management, synchronization, and hardware interactions. ... But high-level APIs come with a huge trade-off: theyʼre slow. // Writing code that performs better in Vulkan is a difficult task ... OpenGL is like infinitely easier than Vulkan. Vulkan ... is a low-level API. [...] Vulkan can perform up to 18 times better on certain tasks. [...] For tasks that heavily rely on the UI, we will see a much more performant system. [...] Essentially, interactions between the user and the program will be much faster, but the underlying automatic system will not see a direct speed increase from Vulkan. ... While I would love for my final render to be faster, I would much prefer to have a performant viewport thatʼs more stable and faster, which is what weʼll have with Vulkan. But this is not the only thing it brings to the table. Many corporate sponsors have granted money to Blender primarily for a Vulkan integration. AMD is donating $120,000 per year to help fund Blenderʼs transition to Vulkan.

I have never had Blender take 1:52 to open... ill open it now cold. 5 seconds.

Perhaps he means opening a large scene with lots of textures or shaders or something.

In that case, I’d seriously question the 6 sec vulkan startup time. Since the bottlenecks would be IO speed and memory availability, not processor speed. Certainly not GPU speed. Assuming assets with, say, 8k textures and millions of verts per mesh. All compounded by the scene containing, say thousands of said meshes.

Time in Vulkan or OGL would barely register against IO and memory when loading such scenes.

But isn't one advantage of Vulkan over OpenGL that it's more standard to upload data such as large meshes and textures from multiple threads ?

But you do that in OGL in any case. Most software dealing with that large an asset base does so using the old fashioned shared context style threading.

It’s all gonna come down to how fast is your IO and how fast is your memory. 6 secs to load all that data, be it via vulkan style threaded submissions or OGL style threading via shared context and syncing, is not likely to happen on most laptops. Even workstations may struggle to read in and generate the necessary data. Most of the reading and generation stage is usually happening entirely outside of the gpu. All of the reading. And most of the generation. Both are going into main memory first.

Again, generation will be way faster than read in assets, but most of the assets would be getting read in. That’s IO before you even make a single vulkan or OGL call. No way around it.

That's exactly what it is. From the presentation link posted in another comment:

Test: Start Blender, open scene, final viewport 3000 objects, 550 materials, 200 images

It's probably a random text generator. Blender opens for me instantly, as it always did, since the first time I ran it on a 75 mhz Pentium.

Blender 4.2.0 opens to splash screen in about 500ms on my laptop. I have no idea what that number could mean.

If you're wondering about the source of the benchmark, refer to the following, page 36:

https://www.vulkan.org/user/pages/09.events/vulkanised-2025/...

Wonder if they pulled that from some biased telemetry.

I don't get how cold start time would be affected, to this degree, by the API used to render the UI.

It isn’t.

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