GNOME/GTK Application tooltips are stretched/distorted

Graphics / Linux Linux
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Original thread - (GeForce RTX 4070) GTK application issue with NVIDIA GPU.
GNOME Bug report - Tooltips are stretched (#5832)

Reposting the thread with a more descriptive title for additional clarity/discoverability. In GTK applications, some menus and tooltips become stretched/improperly sized.

Have personally seen this issue crop up in GNOME Software dropdown menus and hover tooltips in any GTK applications. It’s especially apparent in GNOME Builder (IDE) with auto-completion.

A couple examples from the GitLab issue -

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Thanks for creating an updated topic here.

NOTE: This only affects GTK4 apps. Tooltips in GTK3 apps are displayed properly.

  • Arch Linux | Kernel 6.7.8
  • Gnome-shell | Mutter 46.rc
  • Wayland (meson_options: xwayland=false)
  • GTK 4.13.8.1
  • Mesa 24.0.2
  • nVidia 550.54.14

As one of the folks involved in the original GTK GitLab issue and original forum thread, I’ll add another screencast using Nautilus file manager as an example here.

This issue has persisted now for several iterations of nVidia Production Branch Linux drivers.

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This issue is still present with the latest Production Branch drivers and graphics stack.

  • Arch Linux | Kernel 6.7.10
  • Gnome-shell | Mutter 46.0
  • Wayland (meson_options: xwayland=false)
  • Gtk4 4.14.1
  • Mesa 24.0.3
  • nVidia 550.67
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Happy to see this issue has caught some interest from the nVidia side:

I’d always suspected that at least one nVidia dev must use GTK+Wayland haha!

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Awesome! I recognize Erik’s name as he was involved in some other issues I was tracking (namely explicit sync). Glad to see it’s on their radar now :). Mentioned it’s too late for 555, but at least a fix is incoming some time in the future. Woohoo!

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Two things to note on this old issue:

  1. A fix never landed still as of the 560 series drivers. I pinged Eric in the bug report, but no response yet.

  2. GTK 4.16 switched to Vulkan default, rendering (pun intended) this issue rather moot now. Tooltips are displayed properly with Vulkan.

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Unsurprisingly this issue is still present with nVidia 570.133.07 Production Branch drivers.

GTK4 application tooltips and popover dialogs are stretched/distorted/frozen.
This affects the GL and NGL renderers for GTK4 apps and is wildly annoying.

Linking back to overall summary tracker:

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The old GL renderer was removed in the GTK 4.18.x release cycle.

As time marches on without any nVidia driver fixes, a few positive evolutions have mostly mitigated the pain points with this specific problem.

The changes in Nautilus 48.x to use newer Adwaita toolkit widgets combined with improvements landed in GTK 4.18.2 and 4.18.3 have made the stretched/frozen dialog issue nigh impossible to reproduce now. The tooltips are still a mess but that’s unimportant in comparison.

So, until the Vulkan rendering CPU usage issue is addressed by nVidia driver fixes, the NGL renderer for GTK 4 is now a viable workaround in the meanwhile.