hi, i am trying to run the web start jogl demos on the jogl site, and i can run a few of them. i can run the hardware shadow mapping, infitite shadow volumes, and gears demos. but for the rest i get errors saying that some extension is not found. i am using an Radeon 9500 pro. are those extensions only available on nvidia cards? i am a little surprised… i mean, the ATI cards are supposed to be better, but they dont support these features? is there anyway to get this functionality on an ATI card? does ati have its own extensions? thanks for your comments…
ATI cards (or rather the drivers) are generally better at DirectX and pretty bad at OpenGL.
Some of the demos explicitly state in the requirements that they need NVidia cards, and yes there are a whole bunch of extensions that only NV cards support. ATI probably have some similar extensions but I’ve never seen anyone utilising them.
I’m lucky, I have both 
Kev
are these features just implemented in the drivers? or are they hardware? does this mean that games cant use these features if they want to support both nvidia and ati cards?
thats sort of annoying, but those extensions dont look very useful anyway…
Its kinda both: it is in the hardware and the driver makes them usable for us. the extensions are things that are not in the opengl standart.
if you want to use them on nvidia and ati hardware you have to check wich card the user has and use the right set of extensions.
The extensions are implemented in hardware. The extensions are generally detected by software, utilised if there, emulated in software if not.
As to how useful they are, well thats a matter of what you’re trying to achieve. Some of them are used all over the place.
Generally, the OpenGL spec catches up and some standardised version of useful extensions.
Kev
Be sure you’re using the latest version of the Catalyst drivers. If you are and you run across something that isn’t OpenGL compliant boil it down to a test case and send it to devrel@ati.com.
The ATI folks are generally very good about trying to find driver bugs.
OT: Do the Catalyst drivers work with Mobility chipsets?
Kev
What’s the best way to run the demos without using webstart?
kevglass,
I have a Mobility Radeon 9000 in my notebook. ATI does not provide drivers for the mobility chips and instead refer you to the notebook vendor. In my case, its Acer, and it’s latest drivers are from early April 2003. Notebook drivers are always slow on updates.
.rex
Thanks for that Rex, I’ve also been to my vendors site (Fujitsu-Siemens), but its such a pain in the arse to navigate…
I found this tho, which appears to have generic drivers for mobility cards:
Their update is slightly older, which I’m guessing since its such a geeky site, they got the drivers out slightly earlier…
Kev