Qt Quick 2's Graphics State For Qt 5.8

Qt developers Laszlo Agocs and Andy Nchols have written a summary on The Qt Blog about the state of the Qt Quick 2 graphics stack for the upcoming Qt 5.8 release.

While Qt Quick 2 was introduced in Qt 5.0 with a requirement on OpenGL/OpenGLES 2.0+, the developers realized that was ultimately not enough and they have been working to make OpenGL-free back-end options to fit more of their user/customer needs.

Since Qt 5.4 there has been the Qt Quick 2D Renderer and there has also been work done to better support Qt on LLVMpipe and Qt OpenGL over ANGLE for Windows users. Direct3D 12, Metal, and Vulkan have also come up in discussions about the new low-level graphics APIs.

Thus with the upcoming Qt 5.8 release they have sought to make the Qt Quick back-end design more future-proof and modularized. With Qt 5.8 there is even experimental Direct3D 12 support on Windows 10, but sadly no Vulkan back-end as of yet. Improvements have also been made to the Qt Quick 2D Renderer.

Big Qt fans or developers wishing to learn more about these Qt Quick changes can learn much more about the 5.8 graphics stack changes via this blog.qt.io post.