The topic of Vistas OGL crippling has been discussed many times and maybe I just didn’t find the post that answers my question.
Given an applet using JOGLAppletLauncher (yes, it has to be an applet) and JOGL 1.1.0, I have several user reports that on Vista there is no hardware acceleration. I also tried the 1.1.1 versions up to RC2 (nightly RC3 didn’t work because it is seemingly not signed), same result.
As far as I understodd the various posts, the conditions for this are:
- OpenGL on Vista is OpenGL 1.4 implemented as a wrapper around DirectX
- windowed OpenGL on Vista may not use GDI without breaking the Aero UI
- the native Vista OpenGL implementation does not include any extensions (not even glActiveTexture)
- the native Vista OpenGL is said to be basically hardware accelerated
Sadly I’m currently unable to really test on vista (hardware won’t work in a VM anyway). So maybe someone can shed some light here…
My users are experiencing bad performance because on Vista my Applet doesn’t use hardware acceleration. I disabled about everything, I do not use any extension.
My code is basically down to
xGLCanvas = new GLCanvas();
and the resulting object does not have hardware acceleration. Extending the code above to use a GLCapabilitiesChooser that simply logs all available formats reveals that there is really not a single one reported as having hardware acceleration.
Please note that using vendor drivers is not an option. Apart from the Java plugin, everything has to work straight out of the box on a plain Vista machine.
Is there something I can do to make Jogl use hardware acceleration on Vista in an Applet?
If there is some information out there on this issue, I’d really appreciate a warm and friendly RTFM pointer as well 
Best regards,
Carsten