Question about Render System?

ubuntuuser · April 29, 2025 at 11:09 PM

Does LE use the gl or the gles render system?

**Da Flex** · April 30, 2025 at 4:42 AM

GL on x86, GLES on the others.

**smp** · April 30, 2025 at 5:54 AM

LE10 and older Generic and all Generic-legacy images use GL + x11.

LE11/12/13 use GLES + GBM.

It is currently possible to build GL + GBM image (Generic-gl). LE14 would probably use that.

**Da Flex** · April 30, 2025 at 7:32 AM

GL is interesting for gamers, so it has a constant value on x86.

On ARM platforms the chips usually only support GLES, and GL without hardware acceleration would be way too slow on them.

**smp** · April 30, 2025 at 3:22 PM

GL is generally better for x86. Kodi's GL renderer has an improved HQ upscaling compared to GLES. It also allows using high quality BWDIF sw deinterlacing when VAAPI hw decoding is used. This is important for devices that lack advanced VAAPI deinterlacing capabilities (eg. Intel Jasper Lake). In GLES renderer this is broken/not implemented.

5 years ago LE had to switch to GLES because HDR passthrough is not possible when x11 windowing system is used. LE needed to go with Kodi-GBM. Back then it was only possible to build Kodi-GBM with GLES.

Since then there were changes in Mesa that allowed using libglvnd GL library instead of x11 GL libraries. Also, there were changes in Kodi's GL renderer that made HDR passthrough possible.