In one of the posts below, references are made to OSX 10.3 having a somewhat broken GL implementation. Could someone expand on this? Some comment about specific functions being broken would be good. Are the issues obscure things, or do they come up frequently? Thanks in advance…
FWIW, my 3D Screensaver SpaceTime runs fine under Jaguar while the same code (after being butchered by the Xcode migration process) crashes in Apple’s GLEngine three instructions after calling glCallList (dl); where ‘dl’ references a perfectly valid OpenGL Display List.
As the same code runs happily under Jaguar, but spews under both 10.3.1 and 10.3.2 with Xcode 1.1, I’m led to believe it’s an OpenGL maturity problem.
It’s like a carpenter who’s forced to file the burrs from his hammer head prior to driving each new nail.
Here it is, almost 2004, and I swear I’m spending more time today hearding cats (read: wrangling development tools & APIs) than I ever did in (all) assembly languages 25 years ago, while getting less done!!!
Anyway…
[This message has been edited by ppinter1 (edited 12-20-2003).]
10.3.0 and 10.3.1 (at least) have a serious bug where DrawArrays, DrawElements, &c calls inside display lists cause crashes. The workaround is to use immediate mode. I don’t know whether 10.3.2 fixes the problem.
As far as I know, that’s the only serious Panther-specific bug. It’s certainly not the only bug, though 
I think I’m having trouble with some opengl libraries on my g5 under os10.3.1, i can’t find the opengl drivers for the 9600 pro, opengl’s site says check card manufacter, ATI says check opengl.
i can’t seam to be able to open the desktop/screensaver pan in the system prefs, i get an error here is the crash report
Date/Time: 2003-12-21 03:16:04 -0600
OS Version: 10.3.1 (Build 7C107)
Command: System Preferences (/Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System Preferences)
PID: 539
Thread: Unknown
Link (dyld) error:
dyld: /Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System Preferences Undefined symbols:
_glMatrixMode
That doesn’t sound like a driver or library problem, it sounds like a custom screensaver incompatible with Panther. I suggest removing any screensavers you’ve added.
FYI, the Radeon 9600 uses the Radeon 9700 driver, and the drivers are all supplied by apple; you never need to download a driver if you don’t have an after-market card.
Thanks for that. Does anyone know how to get a Mac to list supported OpenGL extensions? glxinfo doesn’t seem to exist… I’m wondering if the 15" powerbooks export NV_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE. I sort of doubt it, since they run ATI cards, but it would be nice 
In case anyone’s curious, I’m doing some augmented reality stuff under linux, and I’d like to port it to OSX, since the mac laptops look like they have the power to keep up with the desktop system that I’m using. NV_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE is great for displaying an image grabbed from a camera in a an OpenGL context.
GLInfo is part of the OpenGL Driver Monitor utility in the Panther dev tools: /Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools/OpenGL Driver Monitor. It will dump all the supported extensions for your card.
Note, in Jaguar it was a standalone utility, “OpenGL Info”.
Apple doesn’t export NV_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE but all Radeons/GF2 and later do export EXT_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE which should be equivalent. See the spec for important limitations: http://developer.apple.com/opengl/extensions.html#GL_EXT_texture_rectangle
Thanks for that. Does anyone know how to get a Mac to list supported OpenGL extensions? glxinfo doesn’t seem to exist…
Aside from using the GL profiler, if you install Apple’s X11, it does come with glxinfo (you will have to start X11 as well as you simply can’t run it from Terminal.app).
Re: the original question, here’s (yet) another problem with the ATI 9600 drivers I just came across:
Using texture combine mode GL_DOT3_RGB with the GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_COLOR operand makes my app immediately quit. I get the following err logged:
drivers/atikhan/r300_shader.c:2556: failed assertion `0’
So, yes, the drivers are unstable. The 9600 drivers in particular are a big step backwards from my old 7500 in Jaguar.
[This message has been edited by arekkusu (edited 12-26-2003).]
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