Rendering issues under Windows 10 and 11 about gvsbuild

[danyeaw]

@theCapypara This does fix the issue for me, I submitted #1408.

[danyeaw]

I think that 2nd patch is already in the latest GTK stable.

[theCapypara]

Could it maybe be that any enabled direct write support, be it for harfbuzz, cairo or pango causes this?
I am pretty sure I had my users test with a version of my fork again which had NEITHER #1325 or #1328 in them... (for GTK 4! I did test the PR with GTK 3 on its own)
I can give that a go...

[theCapypara]

Disabling direct write again does not fix this issue.

[theCapypara]

I should also add that I ran the demo app with windbg to see which DLLs are loaded. Only system DLLs and DLLs of the GTK ecosystem are loaded.

[theCapypara]

I was told people are also experience this under Windows 10, but I can't reproduce it myself on my Windows 10 test machine.

[jspast]

I am also facing the exact same issue on Windows 11, and it seems to happen in Gaphor (which uses gvsbuild) as well: gaphor/gaphor#3352

[danyeaw]

What type of video card do you have? I am only able to reproduce the icon corruption on newer AMD Ryzen laptop.

[theCapypara]

On the PC where I can reproduce it I have an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, on the two where I can not reproduce this I have Intel integrated graphics 13th Gen and Virtio graphics driver (KVM/QEMU VM)

I'll do a survey with my users to see what graphics cards they have.

[theCapypara]

Another user with an AMD Ryzen CPU with hybrid graphics using an NVIDIA mobile GPU also experiences this issue, this is their screenshot they shared:

[theCapypara]

Another user reports they have a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 on a laptop with hybrid graphics.

[danyeaw]

Ok, to try to isolate what is causing this, let's do an Is / Is-not analysis:

Text and Icon Corruption

Category	IS	IS NOT
GPU	Nvidia, AMD	Intel
Windows Version	10 and 11
GTK Version	GTK 4.14.4	GTK 3.24.43
Build System	Gvsbuild	MSYS2

Is that a good summary, and is there other things we should check?

[theCapypara]

That seems like a good summary. So far I had no reports of anybody using just Intel graphics to run into the issue.

I actually don't know if this issue happens with MSYS2. Last time I tested it (on the PC where I run into this issue) it didn't, but that's been quite a while ago.

[theCapypara]

I just tested it with MSYS2. I can not reproduce this issue, the fonts and icons look perfectly fine.

[theCapypara]

I asked on the MSYS2 Discord server, they pointed me to this patch they have:
https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages/blob/365df49c1b798bb1bde02ac9986ae2edfb2c1088/mingw-w64-gtk4/PKGBUILD#L51C5-L52C51
https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages/blob/365df49c1b798bb1bde02ac9986ae2edfb2c1088/mingw-w64-gtk4/0001-ngl-icon-drawing-fix.patch

That seems promising! I won't have time to test it today or tomorrow (probably), I could give it a go after that.

The other patch they have supposedly fixes blurry font rendering:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/commit/b569470b87d143d30c2388046c9a6450696f19b8.patch

[danyeaw]

@theCapypara I couldn't reproduce the issue in MSYS2 either. Good find and teamwork with the MSYS2 team, I am building GTK4 now with the patch to test it.

[theCapypara]

Great! We might also want to pull in the other patch in another PR, it really seems to improve font rendering for small fonts.

[theCapypara]

Ah. I haven't tested applying it yet, so it's possible, I thought the MSYS2 Adwaita demo had slightly sharper fonts than the gvsbuild one. I guess I could actually compare them later, maybe it was just my imagination.