OpenGL driver vs Cuda samples

Greetings,

My involvement with GPUs has been strictly in the compute domain, ie CUDA with some simple OpenGL examples.
To develop “proper” OpenGL apps (in Windows 10) what do I need, does the OpenGL driver provide the headers and libraries?
Many thanks in advance

Under Windows, the OpenGL DLL which handles all interaction with the installed vendor specific OpenGL drivers ships as opengl32.dll.
(That also contains the Microsoft OpenGL software renderer implementation.)

In your application you link against the opengl32.lib which comes with your compiler to get the OpenGL 1.1 entry points from that.
You could also load these entry points dynamically with GetProcAddress().
Every newer OpenGL entry point is queried via the OpenGL extension mechanism (wglGetProcAddress()).

The easiest method to fetch all available entry points of an OpenGL implementation is to use an existing extension wrapper library, like GLEW: [url]http://glew.sourceforge.net/[/url]
That also comes with all necessary headers. It just needs a single glewInit() call inside your application after you setup your OpenGL window.

All official OpenGL specs and headers for OpenGL extension can be found here:
[url]https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/index_gl.php[/url]
If you need a brandnew extension which is not yet supported by the newest GLEW version you could add that yourself.

If you like to simplify the OpenGL window setup as well, you can use another library like freeglut [url]http://freeglut.sourceforge.net/[/url] or GLFW [url]http://www.glfw.org/[/url]

There are many sites which explain how to start with OpenGL programming. Just search for “OpenGL tutorial” on the web.