While the Blender 5.0 3D modeling software is being released next month, there is already exciting changes to look forward to with Blender 5.1 in the new year. Beyond AMD HIP-RT ray-tracing by default in Blender 5.1, this follow-on Blender release is also planning on enabling Vulkan API support by default.

During this week’s Blender Viewport and EEVEE meeting, the developers reaffirmed plans to switch to Vulkan by default for Blender 5.1. Blender 5.1 stable is expected in mid-March while now through early February is the alpha period followed by the month long beta period.