Hacker News Reader

> It is Gtk and Qt that for wahtever reason decided to ditch their Xrender backends.

It was often slower and more likely to run in to driver issues than just doing software rendering and sending pixmaps. They're now moving to GL and Vulkan because they can be faster and while they have the same risk of driver issues at least that's the same stack used for video games and CAD and such so more people care about it working well.

View on HN

> It was often slower

Any data on this? I can remember that your typical Cairo backend ran much faster on a PC from 2004 than todays GNOME/Gtk runs on current machines. If performance is your only argument you clearly lose with the modern GNOME/KDE + wayland stack. The only way you could make GLAMOR accelerated Xrender faster is by putting the spline tesselation step into a shader. (This was not possible when Xrender was introduced but can be done today without breaking any APIs)

This. I remember KDE3 being fast as hell doing 2D with a GeForce2 MX, much faster than a Geforce 8200 trying to run a similar rendered desktop but with OpenGL doing Xrender's job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com