Determining OpenGL Version & Upgrading w/ C++

[Pauly Man]

I am playing around with opengl using C++, and think it is awesome.

But I have a question. I was looking at a tutorial on multitexturing, and when I ran the program it told me that my version of opengl doesn't support it. How do I determine which version of opengl I have, and how do I go about getting a newer version?

 

[damgo]

Download new OpenGL drivers -- what OS are you using? Does your graphics card support hardware OpenGL acceleration?

 

[grady]

PM me your email address and I'll send you a program that tells you everything about your opengl driver. The manufacturer can write a driver for your video card that supports certain opengl extensions. multi-texturing is made possible by ARB_multitexture extension. Look here for a list of extensions http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/

Every now and then Opengl gets upgraded and basically they take a bunch of ARB extensions ( architecture review board extensions, these are the ones that almost every manufacturer's new cards will support ) and make them part of core opengl. If it weren't for SGI making a pact with the devil ( microsoft ) back in the day, driver manufacturers could simply make Opengl 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 whatever drivers and you would only have to use extensions for bleeding edge video card features ( multitexturing is part of the 1.2 core ). But that can't happen because MS is responsible for maintaining the opengl32.dll in your system folder and aparently its illegal for the video card driver writers to overwrite it and MS won't update it past version 1.1 so everything new since 1.1 has to be done with extension, which isn't bad at all compared to using DirectX.

-Grady

 

[Adam]

I just started using OpenGL as well, and I like it a lot. :)