I am a senior computer science student at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. I am an experienced programmer, and am taking a Senior/Graduate level computer graphics class, and have a question about OpenGL 2.0.
My professor is insistant that we use OpenGL 2.0, and upon investigating which version I had, using
printf(glGetString(GL_VERSION));
I got: 1.5.3 NVIDIA 71.67
I am using SuSE 9.3 Professional (amd64), and am curious about how to go about getting 2.0.
I checked my MESA version, and it is 6.2, which the most current version is 6.2.1.
Thank you in advance for any help or advice you may be able to give me!
well, have a look at the other recent posts here and on the other forums (think the beginner one). We spoke of that.
Anyway, download the latest drivers -7664. But you can get almost gl 2.0 with your drivers, that also seem more stable and less bogus.
Is your professor also going to provide hardware? The problem is that not very many boards support all of the new features in OpenGL 2.0. You should find out if a board that supports 1.5 + GLSL is “good enough”. The only thing that is likely to be missing in that case is ARB_texture_non_power_of_two .
When you’re using the Nvidia drivers, the Mesa version is irrelevant. The software Mesa implementation also does not support all of the features in OpenGL 2.0. The “only” thing missing is GLSL support, and there are some people working on that.
There’s an easy way to find out:
Get the GL_EXTENSIONS string, and check if the ARB_fragment_shader extension is supported. If not, your card doesn’t support GLSL (at least for fragment programs), which is IMHO one of the most important features of OpenGL 2.0.
If it is supported, just install the newest drivers from the NVIDIA homepage, should be version 76.64, then you will have OpenGL 2.0 support, at least partially. But as jide said, it seems these drivers are a bit buggy…