GTK 4.16 Released With Vulkan GSK Renderer By Default On Wayland

Ahead of GNOME 47's imminent release, Matthias Clasen has released GTK 4.16 as the newest exciting update to this toolkit powering GNOME software. Notable with GTK 4.16 is the GSK renderer defaulting to its Vulkan back-end when running on Wayland.

GTK 4.16 now uses Vulkan as its default GSK renderer when running on Wayland while other platforms will rely on the OpenGL-based NGL renderer. The default renderer can still be overrode using the "GSK_RENDERER" environment variable. The GTK developers are comfortable with using Vulkan on Wayland by default after a lot of bug fixing but also recommend users be running up-to-date GPU drivers for the best support.

GTK 4.16 also fixes its initial EGL context creation under X11 and also fixes an OpenGL context creation issue for those relying on X11. The new toolkit also has improved debug output under Windows, detection for the Mesa D3D12 driver, improvements to the HTML5 Broadway back-end, CPU-side mipmapping in GDK, and a variety of other improvements.

GTK 4.16.0 can be downloaded from GNOME.org GitLab for those interested in this latest update to GTK4.