AMD Ryzen and Intel Core performance in new Ubuntu, GTK switches to Vulkan

GTK 4.15 and Vulkan Renderer by default

It’s time to move on, 15 year old graphics cards (yet?) can’t Vulkan can’t hold back the future, so we have a new version of the GTK toolkit 4.15.0 that deploys rendering via the Vulkan API by default. Of course, on systems with support and at the same time on Wayland, this does not mean that GTK will stop working overnight on aging GPUs or solutions without Vulkan support.

The goal is, among other things, to extend the running of Vulkan with Wayland to a much larger number of users, so that everything can be definitively verified as a fully functional solution. The new GSK renderer will not be used on other platforms yet, they will go with the existing NGL renderer. With the next version of GTK 4.16, there will be a follow-up change, when platforms on which running on Vulkan with GSK does not prove to be fully stable will be reverted back to NGL, but the functional ones will stick to GSK and running on Vulkan. This and all other news sums it up Matthias Clasen on the project’s GitLab in the announcement of a new version of GTK.

New patches significantly speed up the start of the Zink driver

Following a two-year-old reported bug related to slow initialization of GTX5 on Intel (i)GPUs, project developer Zink took up the investigation of the issue, Mike Blumenkrantzwho was troubled by the slow start of this OpenGL implementation on Vulkan.

The result was not only finding that where natively running the GTK4 demo within the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver took 190-200ms, running on Zinc took 350-370ms, but also the follow-up work. Mike was able to optimize Zink startup so that the initialization time dropped by about a quarter, to 260-280ms before the first GTK4 frame is generated. Mike describes the details on his blog.

Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund invests in GNOME, PHP and systemd debugging

The Sovereign Tech Fund is newly investing considerable, much-needed sums in open-source projects of the GNOME desktop environment, rewritten in Rust as Coreutils or PHP and systemd. PHP alone receives 205 thousand euros to improve the security and sustainability of the project, the developers will use the money for the PECL extension distribution system, source code audit and other aspects including improving the documentation and developing test tools.

GNOME will earn exactly 1 million euros for last year and this year. The reasons for support include, for example, individual encryption of user folders, improvement and expansion of hardware support, modernization of the entire platform infrastructure (e.g. notification API, GTK CSS, etc.), improved Q&A, accessibility or maintenance and modernization of security features and secure API for Wayland/Flatpak etc.

The fund is also launching its own Bug Bounty Program, as part of the already running Bug Resilience Program. Initially it will be focused on the systemd and Sequoia PGP projects, plus there will be the possibility to pay rewards not only for finding but also fixing bugs.

The servo engine can pass the Acid2 test

A full 19 years have passed since its release, but the reverberations of the Acid2 CSS test era can still be heard today. However, he himself is behind his idea Håkon Wium Lie, creator of Cascading Styles and his dissatisfaction with Internet Explorer. The web engine Servo, once developed by Mozilla, now independent under the wings of The Linux Foundation, finally fully complies with this text, because the last necessary bits have recently been added to its code, such as support for ex units in CSS.

Servo also supports HTML5 video tags without autoplay if the page provides the controls itself. Among other news from the development, the creators highlight the continued improvement of the support for embedding Serva in other applications.

AMD vs Intel CPU performance in Ubuntu 22.04, 23.10 and 24.04

Previous LTS release, last mainstream release, and latest LTS release of Ubuntu versus current top AMD and Intel desktop processors. Phoronix compared the performance of Ryzen 9 7950X and Core i9 14900K in a series of tests. By averaging the results, it turns out that Ryzen is about 35% faster, while Intel, on the other hand, has an average of 10% higher consumption.

However, Intel’s idle consumption is half that of AMD, and at the same time, in a number of tests, its performance is comparable to AMD, where the worse average result is caused by several partial tests, where AMD is roughly twice as fast. The test is definitely worth paying attention to, because it confirms the fact that the new LTS version gives a few percent higher performance compared to the previous one, which was expected.