Some demos fail on GeForce 4

OpenGL Development JOGL Development
#1

Hi all,

Yesterday I’ve been trying to run the JOGL demos at https://jogl-demos.dev.java.net/. A number of them work fine, but the vertex programs titled ‘Warp’, ‘Refract’ and ‘Buffer Object’ bomb, displaying the message “OpenGL extension GL_ARB_vertex_program not available”.

At first I thought it might be a problem with my drivers, so I’ve updated my system and I’m now using the most recent Nvidia Detonator drivers. This did not help solve the problem. Now I’m curious as to whether or not those particular demos are supposed to run on a system like mine (ASUS V9280 GeForce 4 with 128MB RAM on a WinXP machine, using J2RE 1.4.2_03, Intel Pentium 4 2,4GHz with 512MB RAM).

Can anyone please help me out? Thanks in advance.

#2

I believe ARB_vertex_program is first supported by NVidia on the GeForce FX GPU.

#3

Okay, that would mean I can stop worrying about something not being right with my system or JRE :wink:

However: the text next to the Vertex Program Refract demo (https://jogl-demos.dev.java.net/webstart/VertexProgRefract.jnlp) states that it should work with a GeForce 2 or better, which is probably an error (or so I hope, cause otherwise I’ll have to continue worrying :P)

#4

My Geforce4 Ti4200 has ARB_vertex_program, and according to Delphi3D your card should have it too (see http://www.delphi3d.net/hardware/extsupport.php?extension=GL_ARB_vertex_program).

When I want to check for an extension, I use glview (http://www.realtech-vr.com/glview). It provides a lot of information on the gfx card/driver you are using.

#5

Indeed it seems that my card should support ARB_vertex_program, which it may in fact do… but that doesn’t show in the demos…

Unfortunately I cannot download the glview program right now, but I’ll try again later…

Is it at all possible that something is wrong with my driver? Have other people recently tried running those demos (just to make sure that this problem isn’t at the server end)?

#6

I’ve run them this morning on multiple platforms as part of verifying the release build that was posted today. You’re right, ARB_vertex_program should be supported on your card. I think there may be a chance that you are running into a bug in the pixel format selection algorithm in JOGL so that you’re getting a non-hardware-accelerated pixel format. The 1.1 release which is forthcoming will try to use the window system’s recommended pixel format rather than trying to use a purely cross-platform algorithm to determine a good one. This work isn’t done yet but the framework is in place in the source base and I can give you a build to test with if you can’t figure out what’s happening.

#7

I’d appreciate that; I’m not able to determine exactly what is causing the problem. I expect a new build will be very helpful.

PS: I will probably not have time to do serious testing until the weekend, so the result may take a little while…