Rendering issues on Linux

If you can reproduce the issue. You should be able to get rid of the ABI mismatch by rebuilding wxgtk. Could you try that?

I pulled down “apt-get source libwxgtk3.0-0v5” and its build dependencies, did the Debian build, and installed the three relevant .deb files over top of the Debian “testing” versions.

When I launched kicad, the ABI-mismatch message no longer appeared. However, the rendering problems remain - I didn’t notice any change in behavior.

So, the ABI version mismatch doesn’t seem to have been at the root of the problem… it’s apparently elsewhere.

The .deb package version numbers seem to have been the same for the versions I built (ABI 1010) and the ones in the Debian binary-package repository. This suggests a bit of a glitch in the Debian build/release process, I suspect - the .deb version number should probably have been bumped. Confusing but I don’t think it’s at the root of this particular problem.

It’s sounding more like it could be an issue with particular Intel graphics chipsets. Is there some way you could check if the GPU drivers have been updated in the upgrade? It is possible that there’s a regression (or a new bug) in the driver.

I had the same problem and could find a solution that worked, at least for me. Possibly the problem relates to the controller of Intel graphics cards. What I did was to create a Xorg configuration file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf, with the follow information:

Section "Device"
   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
   Driver      "intel"
EndSection

And that’s it, now it’s working ok!
I hope this could help you

@mithat and @pdgarrone Can you tell us what exact graphics card you are using?

I’m using a laptop with a Intel Pentium P6000 processor and integrated graphic card Intel HD Graphics

I have added this info on https://kicad.org/help/known-system-related-issues/#_intel_graphics

Something seems to have changed in the Debian “testing” distribution during the past couple of months. I’m not sure whether it’s a change in GTK3 (I just got a new version in today’s update), or a kernel change to the GPU driver, or a change in X, or in Kicad itself, or ???, but the problem appears to be gone. Zooming of both schematics and PCB images works properly, with all text being cleanly and properly rendered, and all lines and arcs appearing correct.

There was much rejoicing in Mudville :slight_smile:

This issue is still happening (ubuntu 18.04) and on non intel graphics for me.

Please see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kicad/+bug/1767652

tldr; Ubuntu 18.04 did not test KiCad well and compiled it against an incompatible library. You’ll need to use the ppa

Version 5:
http://ppa.launchpad.net/js-reynaud/kicad-5/

Version 4:
http://ppa.launchpad.net/js-reynaud/kicad-4/

2 Likes

Thanks,

This was the only thing that came up with my searching for the issue. Glad to know that it is actually a known issue just with that compilation of the software.

Is the rendering issue considered fixed now? The page linked above at https://kicad.org/help/known-system-related-issues/ still mentions the need to use gtk2 though the launchpad bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1339539 seems to be closed now.

I’m not sure if this is exactly the same issue since I observe this on eeschema and not pcbnew but using the archlinux package, which is now built with gtk3 and comparing it to one built with gtk2, the rendering are very different. The two screenshots below are taken at the same zoom level, both with an autodetected zoom level of 2, no antialias.

gtk2:

gtk3:

since I can’t put two images in the same post…

The page is out of date. We’ll update. Thanks for the reminder

But it seems that the rendering with gtk3 is still worse than that with gtk2. Is that a known issue?

can you check the different antialiasing options? I assume this is with accelerated graphics?

Enabling antialiasing helps for the gtk3 version but it is still not as sharp as the unantialiased gtk2 version. This is on a 4k screen and there should have been enough pixels to show the text clearly without turning on antialiasing.

And yes, I should have drivers for running opengl on the iGPU. I assume it’s using it.

… But What are your settings? I think you want to disable anti aliasing in eeschema. Or maybe it is the supersampling.

I tried to apply the antialiasing settings again to see which one improved things and noticed that nothing in the accelerated setting make any difference. It appears that I’m using fallback and I have no idea why. Switching to accelerated gives a rendering as good as what it was on gtk2.

What could be causing the fallback to be used?

The screenshot kind of looked like pixel doubling to me. Since you mention that this is 4k screen this makes me wonder if you are using 200% scale in your window manager settings.