OpenGL Drivers and Libraries

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This page originally existed as a handy bundle of the DLL, header and library files I was using for the early Swiftless OpenGL tutorials. It also told people to copy DLLs into Windows system folders. That was fairly normal advice at the time, but it has aged about as well as you would expect.

What you actually need on Windows

OpenGL itself is provided by your graphics driver. Make sure you have a current driver from NVIDIA, AMD or Intel for your hardware. The Windows SDK provides the core Windows OpenGL headers/import library used by these older tutorials, while an extension loader is used for OpenGL functionality beyond the old Windows baseline.

For the Swiftless OpenGL 2.x tutorials I use:

• FreeGLUT for creating the window and handling input: freeglut.sourceforge.net
• GLEW for loading OpenGL extensions/functions: glew.sourceforge.net

Follow the installation instructions supplied by those projects for your compiler, or use whatever dependency/package-manager approach makes sense for your development setup. If you are using Visual Studio, keeping the include/library paths and runtime DLLs scoped to the project is much nicer than throwing files into global Windows folders and forgetting where they came from six months later.

What happened to the old Swiftless downloads?

The old download bundles contained files such as opengl32.dll, glu32.dll, glut32.dll, GL.H, GLU.H, GLAUX.H, glut.h, glext.h, OPENGL32.LIB, GLAUX.LIB and the old vbogl.tlb Visual Basic type library.

I have deliberately removed the public download links from this page. They are useful as a description of what these tutorials originally depended on, but they are not a sensible development environment to install on a modern machine. If you are restoring a genuinely old project, treat the filenames above as historical context and source appropriate versions from trusted/current project archives.

If you are starting with tutorial 1, the OpenGL Window tutorial now points to the current FreeGLUT and GLEW projects and explains the safer project-local setup.

Questions or corrections? If something doesn’t work or you spot something I’ve got wrong, leave a comment below. These tutorials have been around a long time, so useful corrections are always welcome!