I’m learning myself OpenGL for my second semester C project (yes, I know it’s an overkill) and found the most limiting factor to be my graphics card (Radeon 9100) - it lacks the most basic GL extensions as GL_ARB_shadow, GL_ARB_depth_texture, GL_ARB_fragment_shader, GL_ARB_point_sprite (though curiously has GL_ARB_point_parameters), GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object or GL_ARB_frame_buffer_object and none of them are in EXT either. That severely limits me in what effects I can achieve and I would have liked to try to have glow or shadow mapping.
And looking through the supported extensions I came across those:
WGL_ARB_pbuffer, WGL_ARB_pixel_format, WGL_ARB_render_texture and GL_ATI_fragment_shader.
Would that enable me to do the effects I wanted?
Like for example render the scene into a pbuffer texture substituting the textures for glow intensity textures, run a fragment shader that would draw glow on the framebuffer basing the intensity on the pbuffer texture? That’s just hypothetical process, I’m not sure if it’s possible with such extensions.
As for shadow mapping - is it somehow possible to go around the lack of the shadowmapping extensions and somehow render the light-perspective depth buffer to the pbuffer and use it in a fragment program (or in other way) to do the shadow mapping by hand, or am I overthinking it and should just give it up on such a card?
And also would those extensions work on newer cards, since I don’t think that even our university has as outdated cards as mine. And is the GL_ATI_fragment_shader extension somehow aliased on nVidia cards, so it works on them too?
Cheers, hope I’m making sense.