anyone have a sum up of what 3d shader tools are
out there for opengl? pros and cons? would be nice
to no what tools people had look at and the thoughts?
(if this is just a java ide discussion- sorry where do i
post this qustion?)…
Tools to do what? If you mean writing vertex/fragment shaders than that depends on whether you’re using GLSL or Cg, both of which have some nice apps.
Cg has a rather nice shader IDE that means you don’t need a whole supporting app to see the results - it might be a good place to start prototyping different effects before writing the proper versions.
yes sorry vertex/fragment shaders.
it looks to me that at the end of the day the shader
needs to be a ARB shader for crossplatform compatibility,
am i wrong there? also dont i need an nVidia card to
use the Cg tools?
I prefer RenderMonkey, mainly because it doesn’t crash my pc, but there is also Shader Designer (which crashes horribly every ten minutes on my ATI card, no idea why), among others. Both are free. RenderMonkey does GLSL and HLSL, Shader Designer only GLSL. I’m not sure if either of them copes with assembly shaders, but if you’re still writing those, then notepad will suffice, right? 
http://www.ati.com/developer/rendermonkey/
http://www.typhoonlabs.com/
this document lists some of the alternatives:
www.gpgpu.org/vis2004/I.strzodka.DeveloperTools.pdf