I have an NVIDIA Quadro card with the latest drivers. GLFW tells me it can create hardware-accelerated windows using my card's OpenGL version (3.3) on Vista.

But I've realised I can't get to all the GL3.x functions. Turns out my gl.h header (provided by MinGW) is from Mesa3D 4.0 and doesn't support anything higher than GL1.3 .

I'm new to OpenGL, but not C or basic 3D graphical concepts. In spite of this, all the advice out there regarding how to get & use the latest possible version (or even finding out what version you have & whether you're using it) is totally opaque.

There is no forthcoming answer to the question "how do I get and develop with version X of OpenGL?" Instead there's a whole bunch of contradictory statements on what not to do (e.g. use deprecated functions) that the newcomer has to struggle through in a trial-and-error fashion.

Rant aside, how do I get access to all the GL3.3 functions referenced in the latest Red Book and online reference pages? If I need new headers, where do I find them? Which headers? Does the header define whether my final program will be hardware accelerated? Am I going to have to mess with function pointers to get core GL3.3 functionality? If I decide to drop back to an older version of OpenGL (say, because it's easier to learn or for compatibility with older machines), how easy would that be? Would I need to swap out all my header files again - deprecation means many older functions don't exist in 3.3 ?

You can see how such a simple question has become ridiculously complex as a result of OpenGL's meandering development history. I hope this is the last hoop I'll have to jump through before I can start actually learning something.

Wow, thanks for the quick reply!

So all I need is GLEW, and my accessible functions will be right up to date with GL3.3, hardware accelerated and everything? I can keep the Mesa3D gl.h ?