GTK4 Continues Improving Graphics Offload & DMA-BUF Integration

There is a new post on the GTK blog outlining some of the recent enhancements to this open-source toolkit for benefiting the graphics/GPU offloading capabilities.

There's been a lot of work on enhancing the graphics stack with GTK 4.14 and more work coming with GTK 4.16. The GStreamer media backend within GTK has been updated to request DMA-BUFs from the GStreamer multimedia framework. GTK 4.14 has the latest GStreamer integration bits to enhance the DMA-BUF handling.

GTK 4.14 also has the new GSK renderers that support DMA-BUF and GTK's new Vulkan renderer also produces DMA-BUFs when rendering to a texture. GTK 4.16 will allow the GtkGLArea widget to provide DMA-BUF textures too.

GTK has also enhanced its compositor interaction and expanded the means by which GTK is hopefully successful in the used application being able to benefit from direct scanout support, such as for media players. These direct scanout improvements will be part of GTK 4.16.

Clasen concluded the GTK.org blog post with:

GTK 4 continues to improve for efficient video playback and drives improvements in this area up and down the stack.