System requirements and JOGL portability

I have an existing application that I’m adding some JOGL code to. I don’t think I’m stressing JOGL very much as it is a galaxy simulation that is basically a particle simulation with 1000-2000 particles. The largest texture 512x512 pixels.

Since I’ve not really had experience writing 3D before, I’m curious what I should tell my users that the system requirements are? I can get a handle on GHz and RAM myself, but is there anything special about video card requirements? Will pretty much any 3D graphics card work given what I’m doing?

I’m also looking for feedback on how many problems my users are likely to see. Is my code likely to run on pretty much everything or will my users have lots of driver problems and configuration issues? I guess I’m really asking how portable JOGL code is across the range of desktop computers out there.

One point of reference I have is an astronomy application called Starry Night. It heavily uses OpenGL and on the support forum it seems Windows users (in particular) are always reporting crashes and system panics when OpenGL is enabled n the application. Am I going to be experiencing similar headaches from my users?

In my experience applications which don’t stress very recent OpenGL features work well across the range of JOGL’s supported platforms as long as the machine has a fairly recent driver set from the vendor. I would only recommend either NVidia or ATI graphics hardware in general and NVidia over ATI. JOGL seems to work well with Apple’s driver implementation for the Intel integrated graphics chipset, but seems to have problems with the same chipset on Windows.