The Current State & Future Of GTK's New Unified Renderers

GTK recently merged their new "unified" rendering code with a focus on Vulkan API support and where Linux distributions are now encouraged to build with the Vulkan renderer. Prominent GTK developer Mathias Clasen at Red Hat has written more over the weekend about the state and future of the new Vulkan and NGL renderers.

The NGL and Vulkan renderers are built from the same sources and with time should prove to be much better off than the existing OpenGL renderer. The new rendering code boasts better anti-aliasing, enhanced support for fractional scaling, arbitrary gradients with unlimited color stops, and broader support for DMA-BUFs.

The new rendering code isn't yet faster than the old OpenGL renderer which has seen much optimizations over the years. With time the new rendering code should become faster. Among future improvements for the new rendering code is proper color handling like HDR, GPU path rendering, glyph rendering, off-the-main-thread rendering, and greater performance.

With the newly-minted GTK 4.13.6 snapshot the NGL renderer is serving as the default with the hope it's in good shape without having to revert to the old OpenGL renderer for GTK 4.14. Those on "very old" hardware will likely be best off using the classic OpenGL renderer that can be enabled via the "GSK_RENDERER=gl" environment variable.

More details on this new renderer work for the GTK toolkit via blog.gtk.org.