Opengl Issues.

I have discovered that my understanding
of opengl on windows was way way off.

I had that a vendor would replace the
opengl32.dll with there own. This is
not the case, look at Microsoft KB
article "How to use the Windows OpenGL
extension mechanism to access OpenGL extensions"
of Article ID 328303.

Is there a well known way that a vendor
must add extentions to MS's opengl system?

Here is something I found on google groups:


Alex Mizrahi
Oct 22 2003, 4:22 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.api.opengl
From: "Alex Mizrahi" - Find messages by this author
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 23:24:02 +0300
Local: Wed, Oct 22 2003 2:24 pm
Subject: Re: OpenGL SDK for windows
Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse

(message (Hello 'Olaf.Baey...@skyscan.be)
(you :wrote :on '(Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:14:40 +0200))
(

OB> These library will statically hook themselves to some OpenGL dll
OB> (driver that came with your video card, I do not remember how it is
OB> called, probably
OB> OpenGL32.dll or something like that)

opengl32.dll, that's dll of OS and should never be updated.
if hardware acceleration is present, it loads some dll (for nVIDIA cards
it's nvoglnt.dll, there's a key in registry that describes filename),
queries it for features it has and translates opengl calls to driver calls.
nvopglnt itself do not export any ogl functions directly, it exports only
DrvGetProcAddress so function can be got. as i understand, this does not use
standard exporting mechanizm at all.

And from emperical evidence opengl32.dll is NOT being
updated. So opengl32 is conduit to something
else that is in turn a conduit to the
real function call on the GPU.