a graphics card and driver for opengl 3.3

Where Linux is concerned Nvidia provides its own OpenGL implementation and also its own hardware driver - all closed source. This obstinance famously led Linus Torvalds to share his two cents about the company during one interview. Nvidia has classically been obstinate when it comes to working with the open source community, prefering to develop their own closed-source alternatives. Intel contributes directly to Mesa's source code so that the whole graphics solution can be Mesa. For example, Intel's integrated graphics almost always use Mesa for everything, for the OpenGL implementation and for the hardware drivers. Here we have a couple options and Mesa will provide one of these depending on the manufacturer of the graphics hardware and how cooperative they are with open source initiatives. Mesa, and the OpenGL spec are just middlemen between the application(or game) and the hardware driver for the graphics card, which is lower-level. Up until now, we've been relatively high level. It also implements other API specs like OpenCL, and it comes bundled with hardware drivers. It originally was conceived as just an implementation of OpenGL but these days it's a lot more. Mesa(aka Mesa 3D) is open source and used in many Linux distros. OpenGL provides a library with its install(the version of which you're seeing in your output) but in order to make these work, it needs to be implemented for a given OS. MesaĪs mentioned above, OpenGL is only a specification for an API.

This means that calls to the hardware will be really fast, among other things. Instead, OpenGL allows for the high-level OpenGL Shading Language to be used which is much easier to use and can be thought of as only a step 'above' speaking to the hardware in its own language. Concretely, if a software developer wanted to speak directly to the graphics hardware, they would need to write code in Assembly Language or other hardware-level languages which are cumbersome and time-consuming to write. This allows software developers - like video game developers - to efficiently interface with the hardware at a lower-level, ensuring speed, reliability, and ease of programming among other things. In the first place, OpenGL describes an abstract, language-agnostic API meant to facilitate easy access to a machine's graphical capabilities. I'm going to start with a brief API definition and move down from there just to make sure all the bases are covered.

A graphics card and driver for opengl 3.3