CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++opengl
Johnathan
Johnathan

Reputation: 827

Which OpenGL version is most stable and currently used?

I've been thinking of making an additional wrapper for my project to use OpenGL rather then Allegro. I was not sure which OpenGL version to go for since I know that some computers cannot run recent versions such as v4.4. Also, I need a version which compiles no problem in Linux, Windows, Mac.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 4359

Answers (5)

greyfade
greyfade

Reputation: 25667

You'll want to look at what kinds of graphics cards will be available on your target systems and bear some details in mind:

  • OpenGL up to 1.5 can be completely emulated in software in real time on most systems. You don't necessarily need hardware support for good performance.
  • OpenGL 1.4 has universal support. Virtually all hardware supports it.
  • Mac OS X only supports up to OpenGL 2.0 and OpenGL 2.1, depending on OS version and hardware. Systems using GMA950 have only OGL1.4 support. Mac OS X Lion 10.7 supports OpenGL 3.2 Core profile on supported hardware.
  • On Linux, it's not unusual for users to specifically prefer open source drivers over the alternative "binary blobs," so bear in mind that the version of Mesa that most people have supports only up to about OpenGL 2.1 compatibility. Upcoming versions have support for OpenGL 3.x. Closed-source "binary blobs" will generally support the highest OpenGL version for the hardware, including up to OpenGL 4.2 Core.

When considering what hardware is available to your users, the Steam hardware Survey may help. Note that most users have DirectX 9-compatible hardware, which is roughly feature-equivalent to OpenGL 2.0. Wikipedia's OpenGL article also specifies what hardware came with initial support for which versions.

If you use a library like GLEW or GLEE or any toolkit that depends on them or offers similar functionality (like SFML, or even Allegro since 4.3), then you'll not need to concern yourself with whether your code will compile. These toolkits will take care of the details of enabling extensions and providing all of the symbols you need.

Given all of this, I'd suggest targeting OpenGL 2.1 to get the widest audience possible with the best feature support.

Upvotes: 8

datenwolf
datenwolf

Reputation: 162327

OpenGL is not a library you usually compile and ship yourself (unless you're a Linux distributor and are packaging X.Org/Mesa). Your program just dynamically links against libGL.so (Linux/BSD), opengl32.dll (Windows, on 64 Bit systems, it's also calles opengl32.dll, but it's in fact a 64 Bit DLL) or the OpenGL Framework (MacOS X). This gives your program access to the system's OpenGL installation. The version/profile you want to use has no influence on the library you link!

Then after your program has been initialized you can test, which OpenGL version is available. If you want to use OpenGL-3 or 4 you'll have to jump a few additional hoops in Windows to make full use of it, but normally some kind of wrapper helps you with context creation anyway, boiling it down to only a few lines.

Then in the program you can implement multiple code paths for the various versions. Usually lower OpenGL verion codepaths share a large subset with higher version codepaths. I recommend writing new code in the highest version available, then adding additional code paths (oftenly just substitutions which can be done by C preprocessor macros or similar) for lower versions until you reach the lowest common denominator of features you really need.

Upvotes: 1

Ben Voigt
Ben Voigt

Reputation: 283813

It's less about operating systems, and more about video card drivers.

I think 1.4 is the highest version which enjoys support by all consumer graphics systems: ATI (AMD), nVidia, and Intel IGP. Intel is definitely the limiting factor here, even when ATI or nVidia doesn't have hardware support, they release OpenGL 4.1 drivers which use software to emulate the missing features. Not so with Intel.

Upvotes: 2

UncleZeiv
UncleZeiv

Reputation: 18488

Your safe bet is OpenGL 2.1, it needs to be supported by the driver on your target system though. OpenGL ES, used on several mobile platforms, is basically a simplified OpenGL 2, so even porting to those would be fairly easy. I highly recommend using libGlew as VJo said.

Upvotes: 3

BЈовић
BЈовић

Reputation: 64283

Then you need to use OpenGL 1.1, and use needed (and supported) functions through the use of wglGetProcAddress (on windows) or glXGetProcAddress (on linux).

Instead of using those two functions, you can use GLEW library, which does that for you and is cross platform.

Upvotes: 0

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