Blender 4.5's Vulkan Upgrade Lets You Smoothly Sculpt Millions Of Polygons

As usual, Francesco Piacenti, also known as FR3NKD, is quick to dive into the latest Blender updates, sharing a clip where he puts the new sculpting workflow in Blender 4.5 to the test. This release introduced long-awaited Vulkan support, bringing a significant performance boost, especially in high-poly scenes.

Of course, it doesn't match ZBrush yet, and hardware plays a big role: Francesco noted he's using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 paired with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, with the footage shown at 2x speed. Still, it's an incredible step forward, as just a year ago, Blender couldn't handle this kind of sculpting performance, making this a major milestone for both the software and the community.

Here, Francesco is using a buttery matcap from his recently released collection, which features over 30 hand-crafted matcaps and is available with a generous 80% discount for those who might not be able to afford the full pack.

Keep in mind that Vulkan isn't enabled by default in Blender 4.5. To turn it on, go to Edit, then Preferences, click on System, and switch the backend to Vulkan. Don't forget to save the changes and restart Blender. To learn more about Vulkan's performance improvements, you can watch SouthernShotty's comparison video between Blender 4.4 and 4.5:

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