Question about GTK4, glitches and GSK_RENDERER=gl

Platform
1

Starting with GNOME46, I noticed graphical glitches on my fairly old hardware (Hewlett-Packard HP EliteBook 6930p / AMD RV620) with GTK4 apps.
I reported those issues first on my distributions dev tracker, and have failed to open and issue for this with gtk since.
The workaround was to set GSK_RENDERER=gl in /etc/environment.
Same issue occured on my parents 2007 iMac. They are running OpenSuse Tumbleweed. I noticed today, that GSK_RENDERER=gl seems to have no effect anymore, the glitches are back.
So, my question is: what has changed? Is there any other workaround left? Or is it game over for GNOME/GTK4 apps on older hardware?

If so, are there any good reasons for doing so? This seems to be not very sustainable, if hardware is still good, but kind of must be ditched due to software decisions.

2

The old GL renderer was removed in GTK 4.18.

Both:

and:

Are simply too old to be supported by anything released in 2025.

You can use GSK_RENDERER=cairo to use the Cairo fallback; or you can check if you can force Mesa to use the llvmpipe software rendering pipeline.

3

Thank you for your swift response. I don’t know much about those things.
What would be the preferred solution?
The Cairo fallback or to try to force Mesa to use the llvmpipe software rendering pipeline?

4

It depends. The Cairo renderer is likely slightly more efficient but it’s also missing functionality that can only be achieved by GL; the Mesa llvmpipe software renderer is a GL implementation, but it can be problematic on low powered CPUs.

5

Alright. I will check these options out. For the day I might consider to buy newer old/refurbished hardware. Is there anywhere a list accessible with hardware supported/not supported by GTK4?

6

Anything that natively supports:

  • OpenGL 4.6
  • OpenGL ES 3.1
  • Vulkan 1.x

should work with GTK 4. In general, that restricts support to hardware that is, at most, 5-7 years old as of me writing this.

7

Opengl 3.3
Gl es 3.0
Vulkan : none

Gtk4 with ngl works for my config since gtk 4.18 (it was mostly unusable before). Don’t know if it uses llvm though. It ‘feels’ slightly slower than old gl, but not much. Really few glitches from time to time, but nothing bad.

Only big companies change their computer every 5 or 7 years :slight_smile:

8

That’s irrelevant.

We’re not designing a toolkit for 10+ years old hardware. We’re designing a toolkit that will last for another 10 years.

9

Oh, I thought toolkits were designed for computers users have, not something that don’t exist :slight_smile:
Anyway, I don’t forsee a lot of changes in the next 10 years.
No offense. But as a simple user, beside marketing hype, I haven’t seen a lot of UI changes the last 30 years: radio buttons, comboboxes, lists, labels… all things that existed even in console mode in the 90’s (remember Borland Pascal/C++). Fancy UI of science fiction films did not materialize (and we also don’t drive flying cars).
I hope programmers have a different experience to keep their motivation.
Have a nice day and relax!