Find out, if hardware supports specific OpenGL feature

Question

How do I find out, if a specific OpenGL feature is supported by hardware or not? In my case I want to know, if two-sided lighting is available in hardware. An approach using OpenInventor would be just as well.

Answer 1

In general, you don't.

If something is part of core OpenGL, then it should be implemented by the OpenGL implementation. Whether this happens "in hardware" or not is not something that you can detect.

For extension based features, you can obviously check for the presence of the extension. But otherwise, there's nothing you can do except better know the hardware your code is running on.