Qt 5.14 Released, preparing for the upcoming Qt 6 with enhanced features

December 12, Qt development team released Qt 5.14, a development framework for creating UI and applications. Getting ready for the upcoming major release Qt 6, there are major improvements, like 3D related features.

Qt 5.14 is the latest version following the previous Qt 5.13.

As to Qt Quick, it includes a preview of graphics-API-independent scenegraph renderer. It used to be that Graphic API had to rely on OpenGL, but now Qt is starting to support various graphics APIs. This will allow you to run Qt Quick applications directly on graphics APIs such as Vulkan, Metal, and Direct3D 11. Graphics-API-independent scenegraph renderer is offered as an opt-in feature through an abstract layer called Qt Rendering Hardware Interface. According to the development team, they are working to improve three aspects of version 6: the productivity of graphic stack, graphic API, and performance. It is their first step to make it not rely on 3D graphics provided by the OS.

Another preview feature is the Qt Quick 3D, which is a new module that provides a high-level API for creating 3D contents. As it allows 3D scenes to be defined by QML, your can use QML based approach for both 2D and 3D UI. Their goal is to let you work on one runtime (Qt Quick), one common scene graph, one animation framework, and one design tool (Qt Design Studio).

For desktop and mobile, HiDPI support has been improved, color space support has been added, and text editors for Qt Widgets and Qt Quick have been enhanced.

By the way, the next release of the 5 series, 5.15, will be an LTS release with three-year support. The current LTS is 5.12 released in January.

Along with the release of 5.14, Qt Creator 4.11, an integrated development environment, was also released.

The Qt Company
https://www.qt.io/