GNOME's Mutter Drops Legacy OpenGL Driver Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME's Mutter Drops Legacy OpenGL Driver Support

The Clutter OpenGL "Cogl" code within the GNOME Mutter compositor has removed legacy OpenGL driver support ahead of next month's GNOME 44 release...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mutter-Drops-Legacy-OpenGL

[mangeek]

I've had 'GSK_RENDERER=vulkan' set on my whole environment for a few weeks, and besides a few small rough edges, my 'GTK fishbowl' performance is almost 2x of the NGL renderer. I saw in one of the more recent release notes that they disabled the vulkan renderer by default... but it seemed quite promising.

[rmfx]

Vulkan was released 7 years ago.

OpenGL 4.6 even, should be the backup driver, with Vulkan as the primary target...

[Nozo]

When will GNOME have Vulkan support?

[mangeek]

When will GNOME have Vulkan support?

It has for a while:

If you set 'GSK_RENDERER=vulkan', you should be able to test. It had a few rough edges that prevented daily-driving until recently, but... I'm writing this from a system where I've had this set in my .bashrc for a few weeks.

[Mario Junior]

Why still using opengl 3.2? Opengl 4.x is still there for ages!

[mangeek]

Why still using opengl 3.2? Opengl 4.x is still there for ages!

1. Because that would actually prevent a lot of hardware from running GNOME.
2. There's no point in using a new API just for the sake of it, GNOME doesn't do 'fancy 3D stuff'. If it can accomplish the job with an older API, it makes sense to do so. I'm quite sure that blasting 2D images out to flat 3D textures and using some OpenGL to accelerate shadows and occlusion is pretty 'basic' as far as what API levels are needed.

[lumks]

I've had 'GSK_RENDERER=vulkan' set on my whole environment for a few weeks.

That have nothing to do with mutter, that only lets GTK use Vulkan. Mutter will still keep using OpenGL, because it only can use OpenGL.

[brent]

Vulkan doesn't magically improve performance for a compositor. The newer low-level APIs like Vulkan excel when you do many small draws. Compositors are the opposite of that - they do very few large draws.

[mangeek]

That have nothing to do with mutter, that only lets GTK use Vulkan. Mutter will still keep using OpenGL, because it only can use OpenGL.

Ahh, you're right! I figured that Mutter would use the same backend as GTK, but I just looked at the source. I heard a while ago that they'd started reorganizing things so they could have GL, NGL, and potentially Vulkan backends, but it looks like they're not quite at the latter yet.