is there a comprehensive driver compatibility/extensions book or site?

OpenGL Development JOGL Development
#1

I’m relatively new to OpenGL - jumped onto a large project about a year ago, and converted it from using Java3d to Jogl.

My problem is that I want to add new features and effects, but I’m a bit gun-shy since I’ve had problems with video card peculiarities and incompatibilities. For instance, many video cards seem to support only display lists and immediate mode (no array lists, vbo’s, etc.). This is a scientific visualization tool, so it has to be able to scale to support everything.

Is there a good site or book which lists what extensions and features that various video cards support, or at least gives a better idea of best practices when adding new features?

#2

What video cards are you dealing with? Any card released within probably the last five years or so, with appropriate driver updates, should at least support VBOs. Any reasonably modern NVidia or ATI card should support at least OpenGL 1.5 plus extensions, which gets you a lot of functionality, including shaders.

#3

Tom Nuyden’s Delphi 3D site has a database of chip/driver/extension combinations.

#4

Cool, thanks pepijnve. Their glInfo tool is especially useful.

Ken: I had problems with laptop and Intel chipsets with such things as dashed lines (they were drawn as solid lines) and array lists (can’t remember the exceptions, but they made me believe that the chipsets/drivers did not support array lists). Not sure how recent their drivers were, but the computers themselves are a maximum of two years old now. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to these anymore.