Why are SDL and OpenGL related?
I was messing around with SDL and found out that you cannot rotate images with SDL. Everywhere the question was asked, people said to use OpenGL to do rotation. I always thought that SDL was completely separate from OpenGL, am I wrong in thinking this? I even found tutorials for using OpenGL within SDL, which confused me even further. What exactly is the relationship between SDL and OpenGL? Why not just use OpenGL if its more powerful and allows you to do more (this is from what I've read)?
Answer
SDL is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, etc. It also supports 3D hardware via OpenGL.
OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL was developed by Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) in 1992[4] and is widely used in CAD, virtual reality, scientific visualization, information visualization, and flight simulation. It is also used in video games, where it competes with Direct3D on Microsoft Windows platforms (see OpenGL vs. Direct3D).