Qt for Windows Requirements
Graphics Drivers
For QtQuick 2.0 to work, a graphics driver that provides OpenGL 2.1 or higher is required. The Windows default driver provides only OpenGL 1.1, which is not sufficient. To work around this limitation, Qt now includes a version of the ANGLE project which is used by default. ANGLE implements the OpenGL ES 2.0 API on top of DirectX 9. ANGLE requires that the DirectX SDK is installed when building Qt.
To use a custom version of ANGLE, set the ANGLE_DIR environment variable to point to the ANGLE source tree before building Qt.
If you have installed additional OpenGL drivers from your hardware vendor, then you may want to consider using this version of OpenGL instead of ANGLE. To use "desktop" OpenGL you should pass the command line options -opengl desktop to configure.
If you wish to use an OpenGL ES 2.0 emulator other than ANGLE, then you can use the following command line options: -opengl es2 -no-angle.
Libraries
- ICU: Qt 5 can make use of the ICU library for UNICODE and Globalization support (required for QtWebKit). At compile time, the include and lib folders of the ICU installation must be appended to the INCLUDE and LIB environment variables. At run-time, the ICU DLLs need to be found. This can be achieved by copying the DLLs to the application folder or adding the bin folder of the ICU installation to the PATH environment variable.
- ANGLE: This library converts OpenGL ES 2.0 API calls to DirectX 9, removing the need to install graphics drivers on the target machines. Building the library requires the installation of the Direct X SDK.
Note: When building for 64bit, de-activate the WarnAsError option in every project file (as otherwise integer conversion warnings will break the build).
Development tools
- Install a recent version of ActivePerl and add the installation location to your PATH.
Note: Please make sure the perl executable is found in the path before the perl executable provided by msysgit, since the latter is outdated.
- Install Python from here and add the installation location to your PATH in order to be able to build QtJsBackend and QtWebKit.
- Install Ruby from here and add the installation location to your PATH in order to be able to build QtWebKit.
- jom is a replacement for nmake which makes use of all CPU cores and thus speeds up building.
QtWebKit and ANGLE depend on some extra tools from the GnuWin32 Project which are provided for your convenience in the gnuwin32/bin folder:
The folder should be added to the PATH.
SDKs and Compilers
A Windows SDK is required to develop Qt applications on Windows. Below, we have listed some potential options for SDKs and compilers.
- Windows SDK 8 (with Visual Studio 2012 Express). As of Windows 8, the SDK no longer ships with a complete command-line build environment. You must install a compiler and build environment separately. If you require a complete development environment that includes compilers and a build environment, you can download Visual Studio 2012 Express, which includes the appropriate components of the Windows SDK. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/hh852363.aspx
- Windows SDK 7.1. Note that, as of 16.3.2012, if you use this SDK with Visual Studio 2010, installing the SDK requires installing the following packages in this order (see readme.html provided with the service pack):
- Install Visual Studio 2010
- Install Windows SDK 7.1
- Install Visual Studio 2010 SP1
- Install Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Compiler Update for the Windows SDK 7.1
- Windows SDK 7.
- A MinGW toolchain with g++ version 4.7 or higher. Qt 5 is tested regularly with a 32 bit gcc 4.8.0 toolchain from the MinGW-builds project.
Popular IDEs
There are several popular IDEs for Qt development on Windows:
- Qt Creator
- Visual Studio
- Eclipse
For the most up to date information about QtWebKit dependencies, please refer to the QtWebKit wiki for Windows.
See also Known Issues.