ATI 5.7 & 5.8 driver troubles

OpenGL Development
#1

  1. Reading back from any buffer (framebuffer / FBO) with RGBA will
    get you RGBA2 instead of RGBA8 by default. You have to
    explicitly pass RGBA8 as argument. :o

  2. Compare these two:

Geometry geom = ...;

geom.render(); // works fine!

Geometry geom = ...;

if(geom != null)
   geom.render(); // VM crashes in ATI library...

So checking for a null-reference causes EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION in the next rendering-operation.
This happens only when render() does vertex-array rendering or VBO rendering. DisplayLists always work.
It almost seems like a timing-error, but I’m only using 1 thread. It just makes no sense.

I’m about to pull my hairs out! One by one! >:(