Question

I m working on a C++ cross-platform OpenGL application (Windows, Linux and MacOS) and I am wondering if some of you could share some advices on porting a large application to OpenGL 3. The reason I am looking into OpenGL 3 is because I think we could benefit a lot from using the new "Sync objects". Nvidia has supported such an extension since the Geforce 256 days (gl_nv_fences) but there seems to be no equivalent functionality on ATI hardware before OpenGL 3.0+...

Our code makes quite heavy use of glut/freeglut, glu functions, OpenGL 2 extensions and CUDA (on supported hardware). The problem I am now facing is that "gl3.h" and "gl.h" are mutually incompatible (as stated in gl3.h). Do you guys know if there is a GL3 glut equivalent ? Also, looking at the CUDA-toolkit header files, it seems that GL-CUDA interoperability is only available when using older versions of OpenGL... (cuda_gl_interop.h includes gl.h...). Am I missing something ?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Answer 1

The last update to glut was version 3.7, roughly 10 years ago. Taking that into account, I doubt that it ll ever support OpenGL 3.x (or 4.x).

The people working on OpenGlut seem to be considering the possibility of OpenGL 3.x support, but haven t done anything with it yet.

FLTK has a (partial) glut simulation, but it s partial enough that a program that "makes heavy use of glut" may not work with it in the first place. Since FLTK is in active development, I d guess it ll eventually support OpenGL 3.x (or 4.x), but I don t believe it s provided yet, and it may be open to question how soon it will be either.

Edit: As far as CUDA goes, the obvious (though certainly non-trivial) answer would be to use OpenCL instead. This is considerably more compatible both with hardware (e.g., with ATI/AMD boards) and with newer versions of OpenGL.

That leaves glu. Frankly, I don t think there is a clear or obvious answer to this. OpenGL is moving away from supporting things like glu, and instead dropping support for even more of the vaguely glu-like functionality that used to be part of the core OpenGL spec (e.g., all the matrix manipulation primitives). Personally, I think this is a mistake, but whether it s good or bad, it s how things are. Unfortunately, glu is a bit like glut -- the last update to the spec was in 1998, and corresponds to OpenGL 1.2. That doesn t make an update seem at all likely. Unfortunately, I don t know of any really direct replacements for it either. There are clearly other graphics libraries that provide (at least some) similar capabilities, but all of them I can think of would require substantial rewriting.

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