The Qt Company Details The Graphics Stack Changes With Qt 6.0

If all goes well Qt 6.0 will make its official debut in December. One of the areas much talked about for Qt 6 development has been the graphics architecture changes and better supporting more APIs besides OpenGL.

Qt developer Laszlo Agocs has written a blog post outlining some of the fundamental graphics changes that have made the cut for Qt 6.0:

- The Qt Rendering Hardware Interface (QRhi) is much more polished and with faster performance compared to the early state it shipped in with Qt 5.15.

- Shaders are now written in Vulkan-style GLSL rather than OpenGL-compatible GLSL snippets.

- The Direct OpenGL code-path without going through the Qt Rendering Hardware Interface has been removed. In other words, no path to go straight from Qt Quick to OpenGL.

- Various OpenGL-specifics were removed from the API.

- The Qt Company has updated their demos and scene-graph examples to reflect the API changes relevant to application developers.

- Qt on Windows is no longer shipping with ANGLE for offering better OpenGL support, since native Direct3D 11 support and the like is available.

More details on these Qt 6.0 graphics changes via the Qt blog.