How can I upgrade my OpenGL version?

Question

I need to develop by OpenGL 4.3. I installed OpenGL Extensions Viewer and it shows me that i have OpenGL 2.1. I tried to update my Graphics drivers from "Drivers Manager" under windows but it tells me that I have the latest version. I tried to update my processor driver too but uselessly I get the same message, that my driver is updated. So my questions are :

1. How can I upgrade my OpenGL version?

2. If it is impossible to upgrade my OpenGL version, is it possible to develop by OpenGL 4.3 even if my laptop doesn't support this recent version?

Any suggestion or solution will be so welcome. Thanks

Answer 1

As far as I know you'd have to swap your graphics card for a new one to take advantage of later versions of OpenGL (since your current card is quite far behind).

I don't think you can develop for later versions unless you make your code backwards compatible and only use features from the OpenGL version that your laptop supports. If you are mainly working with OpenGL development (as opposed to making a game or whatever) that would clearly defeat the purpose.

Answer 2

You will need a GL 4.3 capabale OpenGL implementation. If your GPU is in principle GL 4.3 capable, using the latest drivers from the GPU vendor is enough. Unfortunately, currently, only nividia offers GL 4.3 (and even 4.4, as beta) compatible drivers, but AMD's latest drivers does suppport a lot of the 4.3 features using extensions. There is no OpenGL 4.3 software rasterizer that I'm aware of, so you will need a 4.3 capable GPU from AMD or NVIDIA to work with OpenGL 4.3. Probably, you are on some intel integrated chipset, so you won't see 4.3 soon...

Answer 3

While the OpenGL specifications are written implementation neutral (i.e. it doesn't matter in which way it's implemented) the authors of the OpenGL specification clearly target special purpose hardware (aka GPUs). Since version 3 the major version number of OpenGL is equivalent to feature capabilities, i.e. a major capability bump on the implementation side. Or in other words: A OpenGL implementation implemented along the OpenGL-3 specification will not be capable of OpenGL-4 (OTOH minor version bumps are within the capabilities of a given major implementation feature set; the mostly clean up the API or give access to things which were already possible (and maybe accessible through extensions) but not formally specified in core).

Of course the OpenGL driver itself is part of the implementation. So updating the driver may give you a major version bump. However the limiting part is the capabilities of your GPU. If your GPU can't to OpenGL-3 or OpenGL-4 then all you could do is fall back to a software implementation. And so far there's no OpenGL-4 software rasterizer.