GTK's Vulkan Renderer Will Now Let You Pick The GPU For Rendering

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GTK's Vulkan Renderer Will Now Let You Pick The GPU For Rendering

One of the features exciting us the most about GTK4 is the Vulkan renderer that will make its premiere. This Vulkan renderer continues getting worked into shape for GTK+ 4.0...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK-Vulkan-Pick-The-GPU

[carwyn]

Interesting, any idea if this might let people use both the built in GPU in Intel CPUs along with a discrete card?

[starshipeleven]

For a DE, this selection is going to be used mostly to select the best/more stable driver, not the most powerful GPU. Cool though.

[schmidtbag]

This is really cool. For systems with an IGP, it'd be great to be able to have desktop compositing run on the IGP while any heavy rendering is done on a discrete GPU. Could offer a little bit of a performance boost in some cases.

[cipri]

This is really cool. For systems with an IGP, it'd be great to be able to have desktop compositing run on the IGP while any heavy rendering is done on a discrete GPU. Could offer a little bit of a performance boost in some cases.

Yes, sounds cool! But it's super easy to add this feature (in vulkan)! Anyway you have to do a device selection in vulkan.
If I had to choose what's more difficult, to add this feature, or to go do the laudry... then clearly the laundry is the by far more difficult task.
What would have been a little bit more difficult, would have been not only to let the user select the device, but to have an additional choice in a settings menu like: render with the most performant device , or: render with the most energy efficient device etc.... . Or to have something like this in the power option: when plugged in, render with the power efficient device, and when plugged in with the device that has the greatest performance. etc etc etc...

[starshipeleven]

Yes, sounds cool! But it's super easy to add this feature (in vulkan)! Anyway you have to do a device selection in vulkan.
If I had to choose what's more difficult, to add this feature, or to go do the laudry... then clearly the laundry is the by far more difficult task.
What would have been a little bit more difficult, would have been not only to let the user select the device, but to have an additional choice in a settings menu like: render with the most performant device , or: render with the most energy efficient device etc.... . Or to have something like this in the power option: when plugged in, render with the power efficient device, and when plugged in with the device that has the greatest performance. etc etc etc...

I assume that this option will be mostly set to make sure the DE is rendered on the GPU with most stable drivers first. Even the shittiest GPU supporting Vulkan is not going to feel the load of a desktop GUI, so it does not make much sense to have these options for the user.

[schmidtbag]

I assume that this option will be mostly set to make sure the DE is rendered on the GPU with most stable drivers first. Even the shittiest GPU supporting Vulkan is not going to feel the load of a desktop GUI, so it does not make much sense to have these options for the user.

The inverse could also be argued: it doesn't make much sense to prevent the user from changing it. If all it takes is an environment variable to override it, great - everybody wins.

Anyway, I've seen a setup involving an AMD R3 and Intel IGP (where the IGP was disabled) that struggled with GNOME on a triple-monitor config. Neither GPU is especially powerful, so if this user could select which tasks go to which GPU, the stuttering could go away. Of course, this is a very niche situation.

[indepe]

I assume that this option will be mostly set to make sure the DE is rendered on the GPU with most stable drivers first. Even the shittiest GPU supporting Vulkan is not going to feel the load of a desktop GUI, so it does not make much sense to have these options for the user.

I’ve been reading that for a laptop, the battery will last more than twice as long with the integrated GPU. I think that was for “normal” use, not gaming. If true, then the best choice would often be based on lowest power consumption.

[Guest]

That's a cool feature! It would be great if we could have a configuration UI to choose between OpenGL and Vulkan renderers, and which GPU gets used for GNOME desktop and GTK4 apps.

[Djhg2000]

The inverse could also be argued: it doesn't make much sense to prevent the user from changing it. If all it takes is an environment variable to override it, great - everybody wins.

Except if you're a GNOME developer. Then it totally makes sense to prevent the user from changing it.

Yes I'm still grumpy about bug #650371.