GMA 950 on Mac 10.5.7

[FireCamel]

I'm having the hardest time finding the right information!

I have a macbook with OSX 10.5.7, with an intel GMA 950 graphics card.

I have OpenGL 1.2 installed, but I would like to run Daz3D which requires OpenGL 1.3. The program tells me I need to update my driver.

I have tried every possible search I can think of and can't find a website that offers driver updates for a GMA 950! And I can't find any information whatsoever about OpenGL on the apple home page.

First of all, where do I get the driver update from?
Secondly, if there is no available driver update, can I still use a work-around of some sort to make the program run anyway?
And third, Do I need a new graphics card perhaps? Is it possible to get a new graphics card if it's integrated in the motherboard (which, according to my knowledge, the GMA 950 is)?

Someone please help me. I really don't know what I'm doing.

[James W. Walker]

In general, the only way to get an OpenGL driver update on a Mac is to upgrade the OS, and usually only major OS updates get significant driver changes.

I don't know if it's possible to upgrade your graphics card, but if I had to guess, I'd say probably not.

[overlay]

From the following link, it seems you can't:

http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/capabilities/index.html

Maybe you can force the OS to use the software OpenGL renderer which supports OpenGL 2.1 with the OpenGL Driver Monitor provided with Xcode (I'm not sure).

[FireCamel]

Thanks, I just tried searching for information about software renderers, but I'm still lost.

What is a software renderer? Is it already integrated in mac OSX, or do I have to install it? And what is an OpenGL driver monitor? And what do I have to do to force the OS to use a software renderer instead of the graphics card?

More importantly, why is it so hard to find information about this kind of stuff?

[overlay]

Yes the OpenGL software renderer is integrated in Mac OS X.
OpenGL driver monitor is a tool that comes with Xcode, the Apple package development for Mac.

But forget about it, I found nothing in this tool to force the system to use the software OpenGL implementation.

[James W. Walker]

More importantly, why is it so hard to find information about this kind of stuff?

It's not hard for developers to find out about this stuff, but users aren't supposed to have to know. For example, it would be fairly easy for the developers of Daz3D to give an option to use the software renderer if they wanted to. But until they do, I'd say it looks like you're out of luck, and you should have bought a MacBook Pro.