Qt 5.15 LTS Released, with better graphics features in preparations towards Qt 6

Editorial Staff

May 26, the Qt Company released “Qt 5.15 LTS”, a framework for building cross-platform UI/applications. This will be the last feature release of the Qt 5 series. It will provide long-term support for three years.

“Qt 5.15” is the latest release of the Qt 5 series, released in 2012. It is the successor of Qt 5.14 released in January, and it will be the last feature release in the Qt 5 series. The development team has put a lot of work into preparations for Qt 6. In order to keep it as easy as possible to migrate codebases from Qt 5 to Qt 6, they have flagged a lot of functionality to be removed in Qt 6 as deprecated. Qt 6 is scheduled to be released in November.

They are preparing for the upgrade of the graphics stack architecture in Qt 6. Qt 5.15 introduces Qt Rendering Hardware Interface (RHI), which is a part of the upgrade, as an opt-in Technology Preview. RHI is an abstraction layer for various 3D-graphics APIs. It can be used to run Qt Quick applications on top of OpenGL, Apple’s Metal, Khronos Group’s Vulkan, and Microsoft’s Direct 3D.

Qt 5.15 comes with a fully supported Qt Quick 3D. When Qt Quick was first introduced in 5.14, it was simply a technology preview that let users define 3D scene in QML, and define meshes and lights. Now that it comes with official support, users can easily integrate 3D contents into Qt-Quick-based applications.

Qt Design Studio 1.5 provides support for Qt Quick 3D and was also released on the same date. Qt QML and Qt Quick are enhanced with new features.

Qt Lottie, a module introduced as Technology Preview in Qt 5.14, is now fully supported. This module makes it possible to integrate After Effect animations into Qt-based applications.

There are many other notable improvements, for example, Qt Network now supports TLS 1.3 section tickets and configurable time-outs, Qt WebEngine has been updated to Chromium 80, and Qt 3D has gained better profiling and debugging support.

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