The Qt 3D Story With Vulkan Should Be Quite Compelling For Qt 6.0

With the soon to be released Qt 5.14 is the start of their new high-level 3D API that itself is graphics API independent for being able to target the likes of Apple Metal and Vulkan as well as Direct3D and still falling back to OpenGL. The start of the graphics API independent scenegraph renderer is turning out well for Qt 5.14 but there will be more to come in the spring with Qt 5.15 while at the end of next year with Qt 6.0 should be a much more compelling story.

The work going into Qt Quick 3D and all of the new graphics API independent work for this leading cross-platform toolkit is very exciting. As well, Qt 3D (non Qt Quick 3D) will continue to be advanced too for those wanting more control over the 3D programming process.

Sean Harmer of KDAB wrote a blog post for Qt this week outlining more of their Qt 3D work that's slated for Qt 6. Here are the juicy highlights:

As you may have read, Qt Quick and Qt Quick 3D are being rebased on top of the QRhi layer that provides support for Vulkan, Metal, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. We are still researching whether this can reasonably be extended for Qt 3D’s needs in terms of features and threading or if we need to integrate the graphics API in some other way such that Qt 3D can still play nicely with Qt Quick and Qt Widgets.

There is still a great deal of work to do here but the initial results are looking very promising. We have test scenes containing around 1000 entities able to be rendered at 600 frames per second (with no tearing) on a mid-range desktop when we try to max out the GPU or at 1% CPU load when we clamp to 60fps! This is all on a single core for now too! We have some ideas we are testing out to further improve the threading architecture beyond what is possible within the Qt 5 series.

Those wanting to learn more this weekend about the Qt 3D plans ahead of Qt 6.0 can do so via the Qt blog.