#586373 libgtk2.0-0: huge performance decrease if Xorg's RENDER extension is disabled

Package:
libgtk2.0-0
Source:
gtk+2.0
Description:
GTK graphical user interface library - old version
Submitter:
Martin Monperrus
Date:
2010-06-21 22:45:05 UTC
Severity:
important
#586373#5
Date:
2010-06-18 21:56:43 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Debian developers,

Because of a bug in a video driver, I had to disable Xorg's RENDER extension.
As a result, the performance of GTK decreased significantly, and the
applications on top of GTK, including Firefox and Eclipse, are almost
unusable:

gtkperf with RENDER: 11s
gtkperf without RENDER: 40s

On the contrary, applications on top of QT perfectly resist disabling RENDER.
#586373#10
Date:
2010-06-19 14:10:38 UTC
From:
To:
Le vendredi 18 juin 2010 à 23:56 +0200, Martin Monperrus a écrit :

GTK+ and Pango heavily rely on RENDER indeed. Instead of disabling it
entirely on the server side, you should disable only hardware
acceleration if it’s what causes trouble in your driver.

Cheers,
#586373#15
Date:
2010-06-21 20:56:03 UTC
From:
To:
This seems problematic to me for two reasons:
* there is a technical alternative since QT works fine without RENDER,
google-chrome works fine without RENDER, libpangocairo works fine
without RENDER (according to pango-view --backend=cairo).
* this forces all users who don't have a working RENDER extension to
have a horrible user experience with Gnome, Firefox, and all GTK-based
applications.

Best regards, --Martin
#586373#20
Date:
2010-06-21 22:44:50 UTC
From:
To:
Le lundi 21 juin 2010 à 22:56 +0200, Martin Monperrus a écrit :

Patches welcome, but frankly this is a waste of time.

This should not be a concern for Linux. If there is one broken driver,
it’s far easier to fix the driver than rewriting all applications to use
an alternate code path that doesn’t use RENDER.

“Software is hard.  The way to fix it is to fix it, not sweep it under
the rug.”