(I'll split this from the previous thread "slow, sluggish drawing with pencil & calligraphy tool solved" which became quite lengthy with a title not really matching the topic anymore)
Hi all,
I did not have a lot of time to follow up on this lately but I've got some great news I want to share with you regarding the performance issues we were seeing in Inkscape master (especially on Windows due to extremely poor GTK3 rendering performance which got even worse when drawing native window decoration, i.e. GTK_CSD=0).
Turns out a patchset for cairo (see [1]) greatly reduced the latency of the rendering pipeline giving Inkscape a huge boost. I just built Inkscape with the patched cairo and performance with GTK_CSD=0 is now even slightly higher than with GTK_CSD=1! Also the blocking behaviour is completely gone (i.e. UI always redraws properly with current unmodified master).
Performance with master/gtk3 is still *a lot* lower than with 0.92.x/gtk2, so I hope we can continue to improve Inkscape code (Yale's changes already looked very promising and I think they were not directly related to the changes in cairo, i.e. could improve performance even more) and maybe even GTK3 code (there are some very recent developments [2] which might result in a completely overhauled OpenGL based backend for win32!) but with today's success I finally feel we have a realistic chance to make the next Inkscape fun to work with on Windows!
Best Regards, Eduard
[1] https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages/pull/3675 [2] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/105