Linux Distributions Now Encouraged To Build GTK With Vulkan

Last week I wrote about GTK landing their new unified GPU renderer and as part of that the Vulkan API support is set to be enabled by default. Linux distribution vendors are being encouraged moving forward to indeed ship with the GTK Vulkan support enabled, so we'll be seeing more Vulkan API use on the Linux desktop with OpenGL slowly fading away.

This Week In GNOME 130 was posted over the weekend with the latest highlights for the GNOME desktop world. Matthias Clasen commented there on the new GTK rendering work with some interesting remarks:

"The GTK 4.13.5 release includes not one, but two new renderers. Their names are vulkan and ngl, and we also call them unified renderers, since they are built from the same sources. The new renderers can handle many corner cases correctly that the current gl renderer does not handle, and they offer advantages such as antialiasing and supersampled gradients.

The ngl renderer does not currently support GLES 2.

The new renderers are still considered experimental, and GTK will only use them if they are explicitly selected using the GSK_RENDERER environment variable. The default renderer is still the current gl renderer.

As part of this work, the GSK include files have been rearranged. It is no longer necessary to include renderer-specific headers for ngl and vulkan (and doing so will trigger deprecation warnings), and their constructors are always available.

The previously available experimental GdkVulkanContext APIs and the old Vulkan renderer have been removed.

Vulkan support is now enabled by default, and Linux distributions should build GTK with Vulkan. This requires the glslc shader compiler as a new dependency.

Vulkan is now also used for dmabuf support."

Super seeing these improvements being made to the GTK toolkit and will be interesting to see how the new renderer code works when activating via the GSK_RENDERER environment variable. Hopefully the new rendering code will be promoted to enabled by default soon.

See more details at thisweek.gnome.org.