GTK 4.15 Released With Vulkan Renderer By Default

GTK 4.15.0 is now available as part of the new unstable series for this widely used open-source toolkit. Most notable with GTK 4.15.0 is the Vulkan renderer being used by default on supported systems.

GTK 4.15.0 was tagged this week albeit without GTK.org being updated to point out this new development version. Most significant with GTK 4.15.0 is the default GSK renderer being Vulkan when running on Wayland. Other platforms will continue defaulting to the NGL renderer. The hope is this will yield more widespread testing of GTK's Vulkan renderer. If the Vulkan driver support is in good enough shape, it will remain that way for the GTK 4.16 stable release otherwise will be reverted back to NGL.

GTK 4.15 also brings new GTK font rendering settings to provide GTK more freedom around font rendering. This version also allows GtkGLArea to produce DMA-BUF textures for graphics offloading, text shadow support within GtkTextView, GSK optimizes graphics offloading, and other updates.

See the GTK NEWS file for more details on the GTK 4.15 development changes.