Vulkan Wayland Compositors Are Nearing Reality

[intelfx]

while, that's nice. n all. great work. kudos all around.
however, would someone put me out of my misery and tell me WHY we need 3d for desktop?
What's wrong with the fastest path, cpu? like we've been doing for years. (with or without buggy 2d accel).
And i don't mean the software emulated compositor. . Unless you're going to tell me it's as fast and responsive as.
Is it just the resolutions we use these days or what?
(I don't care for stupid fancy effects, i'm looking for some technical reasons beyond eye candy)

Considering that most of you are using a composited desktop i expect a lot of considered responses.

Because CPU is not a fastest path anymore. Count pixels on a 4K screen, then multiply by bpp, then multiply by some fixed factor to account for multiple layers of textures in compositing, and then compare that with RAM throughput and CPU frequency*IPC. You'll be surprised.

TL;DR: yes, we've been doing this for years. If you are content with a single 1024x768 display with windows drawn in immediate mode (so basically no protection against unresponsive apps), feel free to continue to do that. But copying huge blocks of pixels back and forth is literally the worst possible use of CPU time and RAM bandwidth.

[siyia]

If only one day i could run sway + vulkan on the desktop, it would be the best ever!!!! Latency under vulkan in wayfire is a lot lower compared to sway which feels sluggish at times.

[mangeek]

[QUOTE=bofh80;n1233585]WHY we need 3d for desktop?/QUOTE]

It's more efficient and faster to use the 3D hardware and software than to use the CPU and traditional framebuffers. Crazy as it sounds, it's less work to have each app, the UI libraries, and the window compositor just shoot stuff over into the 3D stack and 'show it' than it is to ask the CPU to stop and handle what should be on the screen and schlep 32 megabytes over to video memory 60 times a second. If you think all this 3D biz seems inefficient, consider what 2 gigabytes a second of transfers from CPU to GPU would do you the rest of your system.

The 3D hardware and software needed to render a 4K desktop smoothly is already on 'everything', and it's optimized to hold 'textures' (windows) and blast them out to the display. Why not put it to use lighten the load on the CPU? I'm pretty sure that even if you strapped a Raspberry Pi's GPU to a Core i7, the Raspbery Pi GPU would 'feel' smoother for regular desktop stuff than a 100% 2D/CPU stack. Plus, the -second- you want eye candy like transparency or animation, you're doomed with CPU. Try a macOS instance out in QEMU-KVM if you want to feel how awful that is.

[CommunityMember]

If I remember correctly, Nvidia can't support DMA-BUF ....

It would appear that you may have forgotten the article from around 50 days ago about nVidia implementing DMA_BUF: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...UF-Wayland-KDE although the details were a bit sparse.

[zxy_thf]

So now they won't need GBM and EGLstreams anymore?

If the system has a GPU that supports Vulkan.

[shmerl]

It would appear that you may have forgotten the article from around 50 days ago about nVidia implementing DMA_BUF: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...UF-Wayland-KDE although the details were a bit sparse.

I don't think it will fully fix their problem. Those kernel issues weren't resolved because they are about GPL. Unless Nvidia will come up with some even more weird dance around it, but then kernel developers will shoot it down even more strongly than before.

[loganj]

i wonder if vulkan DEs will draw more power from the GPU or will be the same or less of GL.

[kenjitamura]

Even if you're not fond of any eye-candy, depending on DE it would make sense to prefer the more performant choice for such when it comes to supporting those who would like such.

What's your definition of eye candy though?

Some day there will be a fiery Michael Bay movie explosion following behind my cursor as it moves across the screen that grows in intensity the further the mouse moves from its initial position. Just wait.

[Alexmitter]

GBM is a buffer manager, EGLStreams is a generic API to manage buffers but way too limited for Wayland.
EGL is a API for applications to create a default context for graphics APIs on a display server.
Vulkan or OpenGL/GLES here are mainly in the context of the compositor doing compositing work.

GBM will still be needed in the future and Nvidia will in short or longer terms have to adopt it, it is the better solution.

[Sonadow]

Compositor maintainers can add all the stuff they want as long as the OpenGL option remains maintained.

As a Nouveau user, it's the only thing I can use.