GTK Lands Their New Unified GPU Renderer, Vulkan Build Enabled By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GTK Lands Their New Unified GPU Renderer, Vulkan Build Enabled By Default

There's been much work recently on a new unified renderer for the GTK toolkit. Yesterday a merge request was opened and already merged that enables Vulkan by default...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK-Unified-Renderer-Progress

[dimko]

is it for new gen of gnome, or will it apply to current stable one?

[Quackdoc]

please fix flutter perf, please fix flutter perf, please fix flutter perf. With my chant done I know wait to see if this will at least somewhat unfuck flutter on linux. Please don't let usable flutter be relegated to embedded linux

[You-]

please fix flutter perf, please fix flutter perf, please fix flutter perf. With my chant done I know wait to see if this will at least somewhat unfuck flutter on linux. Please don't let usable flutter be relegated to embedded linux

Might aswell post "please fix Qt performance" or "please fix electron performance" for all the relevance it has to this post?

(I am not suggesting Qt is not performant. I have very little experience in even using any apps that use it.)

is it for new gen of gnome, or will it apply to current stable one?

This new work will land in 4.14 which will go stable in Feb/March in time for Gnome 46 and is included in the pre-release that will accompany gnome 46.alpha releases. It may not become default until 4.16 though, which will depend on how future work and regressions go.

[pabloski]

(I am not suggesting Qt is not performant. I have very little experience in even using any apps that use it.)

not bad, but boy, those pesky bugs that pop up everywhere!!! I suspect they give the fixes only to paying customers.

[TheJackiNonster]

not bad, but boy, those pesky bugs that pop up everywhere!!! I suspect they give the fixes only to paying customers.

Qt bugs are definitely annoying. For example custom themes can cause segmentation faults. Then users report those crashes to application developers who can't fix it. Great stuff.

[spicfoo]

not bad, but boy, those pesky bugs that pop up everywhere!!! I suspect they give the fixes only to paying customers.

Why do you need to suspect anything here? The fact that LTS branches are commercial only for a time period is a well documented fact. This is their whole business model.

[spicfoo]

please fix flutter perf, please fix flutter perf, please fix flutter perf. With my chant done I know wait to see if this will at least somewhat unfuck flutter on linux. Please don't let usable flutter be relegated to embedded linux

Why is this on anyone other than Google? They developer Flutter. Go ask them. I am not sure why you are talking about this in a GTK news post

[Quackdoc]

Might aswell post "please fix Qt performance" or "please fix electron performance" for all the relevance it has to this post?

(I am not suggesting Qt is not performant. I have very little experience in even using any apps that use it.)

my bad, didn't know anyone aside from me here actually cared about linux flutter perf lol. Flutter on linux officially uses GDK for the embedder, so for draws to the window, you need to interact with gdk when interfacing with native libraries etc. but even with out that, you are still heavily tied to GDK and all it's benefits, and sadly detriments. The performance of the linux embedder is absolutely terrible. To put into context how bad it is, on my chuwi hi10x, a lower spec tablet with a really weak gpu, I get better performance running flutter apps through waydroid, which involves the gpu overhead of running side by side with android, and using it's rendering stack.

you can get good performance when using the unofficial embedded linux embedder, but that is, well unofficial, and has limitations compared to the official one since it's laser focused on embedded usecase. there was a decentperf bump around 5(?) months ago for x11 when GTK removed made the a slow x11 codepath unecessary, but it still doesn't meet the minimum bar for perf IMO.

The other potential perf jump we should be getting soonish will be the impeller work, but im not expecting that to come to linux for a long time. I've put a hold on using and working on any flutter apps until linux perf is fixed, since every single flutter app has these perf issues on linux, and this is explicitly and only a linux issue, like I said, running through android is remarkably a better experience. This sucks a lot since in many cases, it's really trivial to port flutter apps from android/windows to linux, and I mean, as in run a single command and presto, linux build. and the majority of times it's only a maybe a day worth of work to hunker down and get a linux build working

[hf_139]

gtk is deprecated.
Doesn't even support wayland fractional scaling.
All cool people are on qt.