   performance of 3rd party GL toolkits / libraries
  Hi,   As a newbie real-time 3D application developer, I am interested to know whether using GLUT or SDL to take care of all windowing functions will be slower than if I do it my way with pure OpenGL only?   Does any current 3D games utilizes any of these two libraries? 
  they both dont have anything to do with opengl directly. you use them to get a context and those libs will internally do exactly the same that you would do yourself, with the benefit of doing it for multiple platforms.besides that i wouldnt compare glut to sdl. glut is more meant as a helper for opengl apps, while sdl tries to be the platform independent directx. some games that come out for windows and linux might use sdl but... who cares? ;  I''m pretty sure that UT2K3/4 uses SDL under Linux, and i belive that its as fast, if not faster, than windows on that platform, so go figure ;  If I remember correctly, the Linux port of Neverwinter Nights uses SDL. 