This Windows OpenGL application shows you how to create an OpenGL 3 rendering context. In order to maintain backwards compatibility an OpenGL 3.1 rendering context must be explicitly created using the new WGL_ARB_create_context extension. Using the existing OpenGL context creation functionality will return an OpenGL 2.1 or older rendering context.

In this demo we create a forward compatible OpenGL 3 rendering context. Forward compatible rendering contexts are defined for OpenGL 3.0 or later. They must not support functionality marked as deprecated by that version of the API, while a non forward compatible context must support all functionality in that version, deprecated or not.

Note:
1. This is an OpenGL 3 demo. This demo will not run on OpenGL 2.x and OpenGL 1.x hardware.
2. This demo requires the Visual C++ 2010 Library Runtimes. Download instructions can be found here.

Download executable, source, and Visual C++ 2010 solution files.

Change History:

10 July 2010.
Added missing .vcxproj.filters file to the project.

13 June 2010.
Updated solution to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

30 March 2009.
main.cpp: Updated InitGL() function to create a forward compatible OpenGL 3.1 rendering context. The context creation logic will fall back to OpenGL 3.0 if a 3.1 context is not available.