X11 Forwarding: SDL error: Could not find matching render driver

Here's the situation:

I'm trying to do X11 forwarding from Linux server to Windows client (cygwin works). I've been playing around with the SDL tutorials (this is on purpose: http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/index.php ). I downloaded, compiled and ran the examples and this worked on the first pair, so I jumped to 8 and when I try to run the program I get "SDL error: Could not find a matching render driver" error. When I'm locally on a Linux server everything works fine (and I have no problem with whoever redirected X11 to my Linux workstation).

Installed my cygwin packages: Xinit Xinit Server Xinit Mesa OpenSSH

I open cygwin, run startxwin and then ssh to the server with the -XY flags and try to run the compiled example.

From my understanding of X11 Forwarding, the linux server should send opengl render instructions back to my local machine for processing. So the SDL error must be because my local machine cannot find the renderer I thought would be provided by mesa.