[vtk-developers] VTK's OpenGL requirements

Karthik Krishnan karthik.krishnan at kitware.com
Fri Mar 4 22:13:47 EST 2011


On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 3:53 AM, Sean McBride <sean at rogue-research.com>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I don't know much about OpenGL at all (it's nicely abstracted by VTK!),
> but I have read that recent versions have started deprecating and
> removing legacy functionality.
>
> Does VTK require any of the deprecated/legacy functionality?
>

Yes. There's a lot of deprecated stuff that's used extensively in VTK.

However the standard supports two kinds of context creation, the forward
compatibile and the backward compatible context. When one uses
glCreateContext, as in VTK, it creates the backward compatible context that
provides for everything in OpenGL 2.1.

All manufacturers support the backward compatible context and explicitly
mention on their website that its unlikely that they will deprecate and make
life miserable for their customers. Also most of the OpenGL 3.x stuff is
available in OpenGL 2.x via extensions and there's little missed by not
creating a forward compatible context. Its unlikely that VTK will do
anything about these deprecated functions; it'd be a humumgous task.



>
> Put another way, if an OS/driver supported only non-legacy/non-
> deprecated functionality, would VTK be OK?
>

No. But its unlikely that any OS/driver would do that.


>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> ____________________________________________________________
> Sean McBride, B. Eng                 sean at rogue-research.com
> Rogue Research                        www.rogue-research.com
> Mac Software Developer              Montréal, Québec, Canada
>
>
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