Which Library?

Graphics and GPU Programming Programming OpenGL

Started by alexgeek June 11, 2009 09:46 AM

3 comments, last by alexgeek 14 years, 10 months ago

103

Author

June 11, 2009 09:46 AM

I went to the OpenGL site expecting to find download page with "heres the SDK download it, install it, away you go", instead it seems to be like the equivalent of linux and its many distrobutions. I'm downloading GLUT, is that the best one for windows? And how well does OpenGL measure upto DX? Thanks, Alex.

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V-man

813

June 11, 2009 10:01 AM

http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Getting_started

Sig: http://glhlib.sourceforge.net
an open source GLU replacement library. Much more modern than GLU.
float matrix[16], inverse_matrix[16];
glhLoadIdentityf2(matrix);
glhTranslatef2(matrix, 0.0, 0.0, 5.0);
glhRotateAboutXf2(matrix, angleInRadians);
glhScalef2(matrix, 1.0, 1.0, -1.0);
glhQuickInvertMatrixf2(matrix, inverse_matrix);
glUniformMatrix4fv(uniformLocation1, 1, FALSE, matrix);
glUniformMatrix4fv(uniformLocation2, 1, FALSE, inverse_matrix);

SimonForsman

7,644

June 11, 2009 10:05 AM

Quote:Original post by alexgeek
I went to the OpenGL site expecting to find download page with "heres the SDK download it, install it, away you go", instead it seems to be like the equivalent of linux and its many distrobutions.
I'm downloading GLUT, is that the best one for windows?
And how well does OpenGL measure upto DX?
Thanks, Alex.

For OpenGL you don't have to download anything, if you're on Windows its part of the Platform SDK (From Microsoft).

As for how well OpenGL measures up to DX it depends on your hardware and drivers really, for nvidia hardware it measures up rather well to D3D10 in terms of exposed hardware features, for AMD/ATI its at the D3D9 level and for Intel its crap.

My biggest problem with OpenGL when writing anything thats reasonably advanced is that you need to deal with extensions which can be a bit painful sometimes (Especially since AMD has horrible support for newer extensions and Intel seems stuck at the base functionality required by OpenGL 2.0).

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mkuhlens

127

June 11, 2009 10:07 AM

There is no sdk for OpenGL. Compilers such as visual studio and Linux distributions come with the appropriate headers and libraries. However if you are using windows, the OpenGL libraries are version 1.1 which means for any features beyond that, you must use extensions. You can read about the extensions here. There are several extension loading libraries such as GLEW which will help avoid the hassle of loading extensions. I prefer D3D to OpenGL however. D3D is more object oriented, you don't have to go through the extension crap, and I just find it easier to use. However, OpenGL is really your only option if you want to be cross platform. I've been out of the OpenGL game for a while now but I believe the features of OpenGL and Direct3D are still equivalent.