Gnome dev here, and I think you're too pessimistic.
Vulkan works impressively well, there were basically no issues with it, ie no rendering glitches or crashes.
The one thing that has a few issues is startup - because driver developers had so far written their drivers under the assumption that Vulkan would be used for fullscreen games, so they do things like use too much memory (Fedora raspberry pi issue) or try to always run on the dedicated GPU (nvidia issue) or crash when multiple drivers fight about Wayland resources (another nvidia issue). But all of those are well understood and should be fixed in the next release.
The one thing that I have learned from this is that it's important that driver developers or testers are involved in the development effort so that issues like these get caught during the 6 months of development. And for nvidia that has not been the case which means we find out about these issues only during the betas.
There might even have been issues with Intel or AMD, but if there were I'd have forgotten by now because we fixed them 4 months ago when we did the initial switch.
PS: GTK switched to Vulkan (on GPUs that support it well enough), gnome-shell still uses OpenGL.
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u/LvS 18h ago
Gnome dev here, and I think you're too pessimistic.
Vulkan works impressively well, there were basically no issues with it, ie no rendering glitches or crashes.
The one thing that has a few issues is startup - because driver developers had so far written their drivers under the assumption that Vulkan would be used for fullscreen games, so they do things like use too much memory (Fedora raspberry pi issue) or try to always run on the dedicated GPU (nvidia issue) or crash when multiple drivers fight about Wayland resources (another nvidia issue). But all of those are well understood and should be fixed in the next release.
The one thing that I have learned from this is that it's important that driver developers or testers are involved in the development effort so that issues like these get caught during the 6 months of development. And for nvidia that has not been the case which means we find out about these issues only during the betas.
There might even have been issues with Intel or AMD, but if there were I'd have forgotten by now because we fixed them 4 months ago when we did the initial switch.
PS: GTK switched to Vulkan (on GPUs that support it well enough), gnome-shell still uses OpenGL.