Forgive me, but I’m still considered a noob with OpenGL. I have done Direct3D work in the past and I came in great appreciation for the reference rasterizer that was used for testing new features that my video card does not support. This was often slow, but it got the testing done. Say that my OpenGL v1.3 driver had to test some 2.0 feaures. In Direct3D, I could test Direct3D 10 features from my 9.0 interface. I am wondering if OpenGL has such an option.
A long time ago yes, it was called the “sample implementation”, but that v1.2
Now, there isn’t. There is Mesa
http://www.mesa.org
It’s v1.5 and also has a bunch of extensions. They added the old GLSL extensions (ARB_shader_language100) which work almost like GL 2.0