OpenGL 4 hardware

I am mainly programming on my laptop. Unfortunately my laptop only has intel graphics that supports opengl 2.0 and directx 10.1.
So I want to buy a new laptop, but then I obviously want to have OpenGL 4.x.

But it’s funny that no one mentions opengl, only directx.

Even new graphic cards come without support for opengl 4.

AMD Radeon™ HD 7340 Graphics with 256 MB of dedicated system memory, supporting Unified Video Decoder 3 (UVD3), OpenCL™ 1.1, OpenGL® 3.1, OpenEXR High Dynamic-Range (HDR) technology, Shader Model 5.0, Microsoft® DirectX® 11

I don’t really care about the performance too much. I just want to use the new pipeline with the new shaders. I always thought if they have directx11 support they should have opengl 4 support , but they don’t.

Maybe you can give me a rough direction on what laptop hardware I have to look to get opengl 4 support?

edit: oh well that was just false information, they do support opengl 4.1.

http://www.amd.com/us/products/notebook/graphics/7000m/7300m/Pages/radeon-7300m.aspx#2

If the GPU supports DirectX 11, then it is capable of GL4. However, it gets tricky because some laptop vendors only allow you to install graphics drivers from them, which could give you trouble if it’s an older driver which might not have some of the GL4 features in the OpenGL portion. NVidia and AMD GPUs on all new laptops should all be GL4 capable, though. The Intel HD4000 also advertises GL4 support but Intel does not have a good history of OpenGL implementations so you might want to steer clear of that.

The notable exception is OSX - you’ll be stuck with GL3.2 regardless of the hardware installed, because Apple has its own OpenGL implementation which is lagging behind everyone else.

Really?
How can they block official drivers? Never heard something like this.

I am thinking of buying
Lenovo IdeaPad S206 29,5 cm (11,6 inches) Notebook (AMD E1-1200, 1,4GHz, 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD, Radeon HD 7310 for $240. Just don’t know how it is to code on a 11.6 inches laptop.

some laptop vendors only allow you to install graphics drivers from them, which could give you trouble if it’s an older driver which might not have some of the GL4 features in the OpenGL portion.

This is most likely because they need some intiallisation code that is not present in the graphics card manufacture’s driver. I don’t know how common this - in the past it was quite common but probably less so now because there are only a few unique manufactures of laptops.