Gtk performance issues from a user's point of view

[Tero Huttunen <tero huttunen tut fi>]

Hi!

I think one of the reasons for the slowness is the fact that Gtk draws
everything with CPU, instead of accelerating it with graphics hardware.

I did some testing by modifying my r200 driver so that solid fills and
line draws on the accelerated path are drawn with reddish color.
However, I didn't modify Render, which is why the aa-fonts and icons are
unchanged.

The test was done for Kate, Gedit and Emacs, and the results are shown 
in:
http://www.students.tut.fi/~huttune2/accel.png

It seems, that Gtk is drawing everything with non-accelerated path,
whereas Qt and Xt seem to be good at accelerating things. Now, Gtk could
be drawing everything through Render (including solid-fills), however,
it probably isn't. It is more likely, that Gtk backbuffers are never in
video-memory, where the drawing operations could be accelerated.

--
Tero Huttunen