Does anybody know a good way to trace these OpenGL functions so that someone like me can better understand their true meanings, or do I have to take alot of things for granted?
You shouldn’t have to take anything for granted. The “True Meanings” of the functions in the OpenGL API are very well documented, especially in the Blue Book .
If you really want to see the inner guts of a particular implementation of OpenGL, you can take a look at the “standard reference” implementation (the link is somewhere on www.opengl.org)) or you can take a look at Mesa3D .
Hope this helps.
You can find a link to the OpenGL specification on this page. http://www.opengl.org/developers/documentation/specs.html
It’s a pretty good resource for understanding the guts of OpenGL a bit better.