Windows

LLVM and Intel C++ compiler support

SDL will build with the Visual Studio project files with LLVM-based compilers, such as the Intel oneAPI C++ compiler, but you'll have to manually add the "-msse3" command line option to at least the SDL_audiocvt.c source file, and possibly others. This may not be necessary if you build SDL with CMake instead of the included Visual Studio solution.

Details are here: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/issues/5186

OpenGL ES 2.x support

SDL has support for OpenGL ES 2.x under Windows via two alternative implementations.

The most straightforward method consists in running your app in a system with a graphic card paired with a relatively recent (as of November of 2013) driver which supports the WGL_EXT_create_context_es2_profile extension. Vendors known to ship said extension on Windows currently include nVidia and Intel.

The other method involves using the ANGLE library. If an OpenGL ES 2.x context is requested and no WGL_EXT_create_context_es2_profile extension is found, SDL will try to load the libEGL.dll library provided by ANGLE.

To obtain the ANGLE binaries, you can either compile from source from https://chromium.googlesource.com/angle/angle or copy the relevant binaries from a recent Chrome/Chromium install for Windows. The files you need are:

• libEGL.dll
• libGLESv2.dll
• d3dcompiler_46.dll (supports Windows Vista or later, better shader compiler) or d3dcompiler_43.dll (supports Windows XP or later)

If you compile ANGLE from source, you can configure it so it does not need the d3dcompiler_* DLL at all (for details on this, see their documentation). However, by default SDL will try to preload the d3dcompiler_46.dll to comply with ANGLE's requirements. If you wish SDL to preload d3dcompiler_43.dll (to support Windows XP) or to skip this step at all, you can use the SDL_HINT_VIDEO_WIN_D3DCOMPILER hint (see SDL_hints.h for more details).

Known Bugs:

• SDL_GL_SetSwapInterval is currently a no op when using ANGLE. It appears that there's a bug in the library which prevents the window contents from refreshing if this is set to anything other than the default value.

Vulkan Surface Support

Support for creating Vulkan surfaces is configured on by default. To disable it change the value of SDL_VIDEO_VULKAN to 0 in SDL_config_windows.h. You must install the Vulkan SDK in order to use Vulkan graphics in your application.

Transparent Window Support

SDL uses the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) to create transparent windows. DWM is always enabled from Windows 8 and above. Windows 7 only enables DWM with Aero Glass theme.

However, it cannot be guaranteed to work on all hardware configurations (an example is hybrid GPU systems, such as NVIDIA Optimus laptops).