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What's the poop on point sprites?




I'm using point sprites and a custom shader to render a star field in an astronomy program. Switching to this method makes my star fields almost "free", so it's a very desirable optimization (they are rendered via a VBO). I have four test machines, and depending on how I move the shells around (a metaphor for you non-american readers) I get a variety of results:


Newer machines running Tiger or Leopard... wow, that's fast and pretty.

Older machines, depending on the order of operations, or changes to the shader... locks up machine completely with a test shader (OS X 10.4.11), or stars are always green (same machine), or points do not obey GL_VERTEX_PROGRAM_POINT_SIZE.
I've never seen a single OpenGL feature behave so many different ways on different machines/configurations. Point sprites really don't seem to me to be _that_ hard to implement...


A search of the archives reveals that all these problems have been reported before, but no one from Apple seems to have any response (or if so, I have missed them). Older ATI hardware with 9600 based chipsets... is this EVER going to be fixed? I'm running the newest 10.4.11 PPC build and my whole machine just freak'n hangs. I would be happy to at least hear "this is a hardware limitation and we just can't fix it". At least that would show up in the archives and all us point sprite fan boys could give up our false hopes ;-)

Richard


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