Hello,

There are several issues that I need to overcome. None of the utilities for OpenGL driver detection work on my laptop.

I have an Acer - Aspire with an Intel Pentium P6200 and Intel Integrated Graphics. Intel website only tells me the drivers shipped from the factory (2.1). The system has been updated, so I know that I have later drivers but can't get a utility which is compatible with my chipset.

One would think that I should be okay because I have updated graphics API drivers and OS (Win 7 ). It has DirectX 11 and I know that the chipset is compatible with OpenGL 4.X

I am building with Visual Studio Community Edition. Is OpenGL detection part of the build process in VS?

Advanced OpenGL features won't be needed by me for a couple years, so I am thinking that I should be okay on that basis.

Thoughts?

Please see:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Pentium-P6200-Notebook-Processor.40596.0.html

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Graphics-Media-Accelerator-HD.23065.0.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_graphics_processing_units

Specifically, this is an Arrandale CPU with Ironlake graphics. It supports Direct3D 10.1 (not 11) and OpenGL 2.1 (not 4.x); it does support shader model 4.1 under Direct3D, but that's not the same thing as the OpenGL version.

So since your hardware doesn't support any GL version beyond 2.1, you're stuck with OpenGL 2.1.

There's a great program for openGL, OpenGL Extension Viewer,

http://www.realtech-vr.com/glview/

You can see what is supported in your system.

The issue with linking OpenGL is that the VS doesn't do anything for you. OpenGL is some list of functions in the system(The C api) which you need to resolve.

There are libraries that do that, for exmaple the most famous one Glew.

So you may not know what is supported until you run the code (Or check via the program I gave you).

That's why some unconventional extensions needed to be checked before used, and that's why not all the systems support all features in games.

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I've worked on a laptop with an intel integrated HD graphics card, this is a bit of pain in the ass because it won't fully utilize your openGL application.

There's a really bad support for OpenGL and usually even the performance lack.

Although some extensions do work which are basics in the core 3.2 openGL. Therefore, you may still use it to learn.