Question

Recently I bumped into a problem where my OpenGL program would not render textures correctly on a 2-year-old Lenovo laptop with an nVidia Quadro 140 card. It runs OpenGL 2.1.2, and GLSL 1.20, but when I turned on mip-mapping, the whole screen is black, with no warnings or errors.

This is my texture filter code:

glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_GENERATE_MIPMAP, GL_TRUE);

After 40 minutes of fiddling around, I found out mip-mapping was the problem. Turning it off fixed it:

// glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR);
// glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_GENERATE_MIPMAP, GL_TRUE);

I get a lot of aliasing, but at least the program is visible and runs fine.

Finally, two questions:

1. What’s the best or standard way to check if mip-mapping is available on a machine, aside from checking OpenGL versions?
2. If mip-mapping is not available, what’s the best work-around to avoid aliasing?

Edit:

Here’s the question I’m really after:

How do you programmactically check if mip-mapping is available on a platform?

Answer 1

OpenGL 1.4 is required for support for automatic mipmap generation (using GL_GENERATE_MIPMAP), texturing using mipmaps should be available on virtually every graphic card out there.
I guess the problem might not be
missing mipmapping functionality
but maybe the generation of the
mipmaps. Just for debugging
purposes, can you try generating the
mipmaps using gluBuild2DMipmaps?

If this problem is specific to this graphic card/configuration, checking for updated drivers might be a good idea, too.

A good method to get rid of aliasing is multisampling.