Note that I haven't really optimized it yet. Certainly there should be low-hanging fruits, but I don't dare to get them as it is good enough for me as GNOME is no longer laggy and I know some overheads cannot be eliminated.
If I have to do graphics-intensive workload, I would simply run it on macOS or buy another accelerator as M1 is not the best performant graphics accelerator in the market anyway.
Virgil 3D does good enough for my workload. I saw some problems in GLES backend support but they are minor and I have already written patches for them.
However, as feature_list in src/vrend_renderer.c shows, some features are unavailable and cannot be emulated. It is good enough but not perfect (and I think it is reasonable.)
Thank you for your work & reply. I already submitted some and a few were merged and one is in review.
The other patches are not submitted yet because they require a little change for Epoxy, which is not merged yet, or I'm being lazy. Maybe I should open a MR as a RFC.
Virgil 3D renderer provides some desktop GL emulation, so it is still somewhat usable. But a serious application expecting desktop GL would see glitches.
My recommendation is to use Wayland, and to play serious games on macOS (although such games are not available on Linux AArch64 anyway...)
I haven't tried XQuartz at all because I didn't think that kind of software has plenty of resource and is well maintained. Retina support is just one problem caused by lack of maintenance.
There are only two options: hack Virgil 3D or hack XQuartz. You cannot "just" run XQuartz and solve problems. And I choose hacking Virgil 3D because it should have less communication overhead and work with Wayland.
For me, it is completely fine. I just develop some softwares with little graphics load, and use Web applications and watch some videos.
You have no luck here if you are going to play modern games, but modern proprietary game engines do not support AArch64 Linux anyway. It would be difficult time for Linux desktop if other PC vendors migrate to AArch64.
Note that I haven't really optimized it yet. Certainly there should be low-hanging fruits, but I don't dare to get them as it is good enough for me as GNOME is no longer laggy and I know some overheads cannot be eliminated.
If I have to do graphics-intensive workload, I would simply run it on macOS or buy another accelerator as M1 is not the best performant graphics accelerator in the market anyway.