GTK Lands Their New Unified GPU Renderer, Vulkan Build Enabled By Default

There's been much work recently on a new unified renderer for the GTK toolkit. Yesterday a merge request was opened and already merged that enables Vulkan by default.

Open the past month has been this merge request to introduce a new unified renderer (the "GPU renderer") for the GTK toolkit. This ultimately aims to replace both the existing OpenGL and Vulkan renderers. The Vulkan renderer will work with any Vulkan version while the new OpenGL code targets OpenGL 3.3+ and OpenGL ES 3.0+.

That new unified GPU renderer was merged on Sunday and is now in the GTK Git codebase.

Following that this merge request was opened and merged with some API changes as well as now enabling Vulkan by default. At build-time Vulkan is now enabled by default for GTK unless force-disabled via the "-Dvulkan=disabled" option or when compiling on macOS.

The main set of patches introducing the unified renderer is 24.8k lines of new code while dropping 9.6k lines of existing code. Exciting weekend in the GTK space with a big step forward for their modern GPU-accelerated rendering.