The vast, vast, vast majority of the apps i use daily don't do any GPU rendering, just plain classic widget-based productivity apps
The vast, vast, vast majority of the apps i use daily don't do any GPU rendering, just plain classic widget-based productivity apps
It sounds like the vast majority of apps you use are very old. Even plain productivity apps benefit from GPU rendering. If they don't it's because those apps are far behind, compare to things like Electron apps where everything has been GPU accelerated for quite some time because of Skia.
Also apps that do gpu rendering make my laptop really heat up and loose battery quickly compared to when it's not in use - I don't use a compositor partly for this (+ the occasional frame lag)
And that sounds like something is seriously wrong with your machine or your drivers. GPU rendering has massively improved performance and battery life on every machine I've ever tried. And especially on embedded devices with a low power mobile GPU, see for example here: https://social.librem.one/@dos/104984930233748319
Compositing should do so as well by avoiding unnecessary redraws. That sequencer would probably benefit greatly on a Raspberry by using GPU rendering, the screenshot even shows it rendering video and shaders...
I use a tiling WM so I doubt it would help much. If anything, if I run a whole system profile with perf, rendering does not even show up when compared to just running a git status here.
> That sequencer would probably benefit greatly on a Raspberry by using GPU rendering, the screenshot even shows it rendering video and shaders...
Sure, the video & shader parts use GPU of course. But for the main GUI, it can be rendered with OpenGL or with Qt's software renderer ; from my tests (and lord knows I've spent entire weeks profiling and doing everything I could to improve rendering performance) the OpenGL backend for the main GUI only becomes more worth it when using a 4k resolution - and GL is absolutely full of bugs on e.g. windows ; yes there are still people with GMA500 GPUs. Qt's software renderer has no issue rendering at a 1080 screen size on a Pi 3.