I’m a relative beginner with OpenGL (I’m not counting the ver. 1.1 NeHe tutorials I’ve done, because I’m trying to learn to do it the modern way with custom shaders), and I don’t quite grasp how the different versions work, which ones require hardware changes, and which ones only require updates to the driver. Also, I’ve tried to find more details about how GLEW works (without diving into the code – yet), and it’s still not clicking. While learning, I’m trying to find a balance between forward and backward compatibility in my code, especially since I’m working with older hardware, and it could become the basis of a game down the road. I’m trying to decide which version of GL and GLSL to code for.
My specific question is this: Why, when I use the GLEW (2.7) library (also using GLFW), does GLEW_VERSION_3_2 evaluate to true, even though the advertising for my GPU says it’s only 2.0 compliant? Is it emulating higher-version functionality in software? Is it exposing hardware extensions in a way that makes it behave transparently like 3.2? Is it just a bug in GLEW?
Then whatever advertisement you were looking at was wrong. All HD-4xxx class GPUs (whether integrated, mobile, or discrete cards) are perfectly capable of OpenGL 3.3. That ad was either extremely old, simply incorrect, or you read it wrong.