alt Hacker NewsToolkits don't use X to do much (if any) drawing these days. They all use something like cairo or skia or -- yes -- OpenGL to render offscreen, and then upload to X for display (or in the case of OpenGL, they can also do direct rendering).
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sprash • yesterday at 7:05 AM
If you use Cairo on X11 rendering automatically happens with the XRender extension. This is a rather efficient wire protocol that supports sub-pixel coordinates, transparency, gradients and more. No off-screen rendering required. (Some of the older gtk2 theme engines worked that way and allowed beautiful UIs with fast remote capabilities.)
Yes toolkit authors have realized they have to avoid X11 as much as possible if they want to have good results.
This one of the major motivations as to why X11 guys decided Wayland was a good idea.
Because having your display server draw your application's output instead of your application drawing the output is a bad idea.