OpenGL for games in Windows XP

For OpenGL hardware accelerated games to work correctly your video cards driver must include OpenGL support in addition to having a video card that supports OpenGL instructions. The great majority of cards support OpenGL, some integrated video chipsets and older video cards (made before 1998) may not or do but at very slow speeds.

The video drivers on the Windows XP CD-ROM (That are installed by default) do not support any form of hardware accelerated OpenGL, so even if your card does, games will fail to run until you install an updated driver from your video cards manufacturer. What would happen in this case would be the game might spot the software mode OpenGL renderer that ships as part of Windows (for certain Screensavers, not suitable to run hardware accelerated OpenGL) and attempt to use it which would bring up the opengl sub system load failures type errors which often appear on the Windows XP Games newsgroup.

• 3Dfx Voodoo/Rush/Banshee Owners

        3Dfx no longer produces video cards or drivers, the drivers written by Microsoft for Windows XP do not support OpenGL. 3rd party drivers with possible support for OpenGL can be found here

Video Card Manufacturer Sites:

3Dfx Interactive - See Above
3Dlabs - http://www.3dlabs.com/
Asus - http://www.asus.com/
ATI - http://support.atitech.ca/
Aztech Labs - http://www.aztechlabs.com/
Canopus - http://www.canopuscorp.com/
Creative Labs - http://www.creativelabs.com/
Diamond Multimedia - http://www.diamondmm.com
Elsa Technology - http://www.elsa.de/
Guillemot - http://www.guillemot.com/
Hercules (see Guillemot) - http://www.guillemot.com/
I/O Magic - http://www.iomagic.com/
Jaton - http://www.jaton.com/
Leadtek - http://www.leadtek.com/
Matrox - http://www.matrox.com/
NVIDIA - http://www.nvidia.com/
Orchid (see Diamond MM) - http://www.diamondmm.com/
SiS - http://www.sis.com.tw/
VIA Technologies - http://www.viatech.com/
VideoLogic - http://www.videologic.com/