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GTK4's GPU-accelerated GL renderer(s) got a major performance boost in the last few days! Previously it struggled to render simple UIs with single digit FPS on the Librem 5; now it can get pretty fancy :)

Fun fact - the biggest difference comes from this single commit: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/c

Then the new "ngl" renderer and fixes in the Wayland backend boost the performance even further.

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@dos does better graphics performance help gnome web be more usable?

@dubstar_04 @dos I used dconf-editor to change the /org/gnome/epiphany/web/hardware-acceleration-policy from on-demand to always, and that makes GNOME Web usable for me on all the different sites.

(You can just search for accel and it should be at the top.)

Before this tweak, it would be painfully slow, especially to scroll around in complex web apps.

I also adjusted the value in the various "installed" webapps (menu → "Install Site as Web Application..." in Web) to make those faster too.

@dos @dubstar_04 Oh, cool to see!

I just found out about the setting.

Before this, I kept trying to use GNOME Web on my laptops, but it was just simply too slow. But now, it's finally acceptable (even if it's not as smooth as Firefox).

I filed a (now closed) bug about it (thinking it was related to Epiphany, perhaps on Intel GPUs or something), but it's an upstream WebKit issue, apparently: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/epiphan

Glad it's enabled in Librem 5!

@dubstar_04 @garrett I never seen it working on the PinePhone, and even if it did it likely wouldn't help much there.

@dos will the purism team port posh to GTK+4 then?

The perf improvements seem quite desirable.

@lorabe phosh itself doesn't render that much, so maybe aside of smoother scrolling in app list it won't really matter for performance - the apps getting ported matter much more. Using GTK4 with GL in phosh will enable us to make it more fancy though, so it's still desirable.

However, we need something like gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/m to get merged first before that can happen.

@dos yeah, many people desire posh to just feel smoother, IMO that would be a killer "feature".

I asume that from this point on, things will only improve.

@dos @lorabe I wouldn't say it doesn't matter that much; the app thumbnails in carousel are also pretty expensive. Nevermind having _live_ thumbnails and/or animated overview transition.

@exalm @lorabe They are so expensive because they're buggy, I'm about to push a fix for that. But yeah, live thumbnails will wait for gtk4 indeed :)

@dos @lorabe kinda; HdyCarousel goes out of its way to avoid redrawing them at all costs. I was very happy deleting that code from the GTK4 port. :)

@dos what Fps is now to be expected in the common gtk4-demo benchmarks?

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