Round Points on Various Cards

[MacFiend]

Just wondering what the deal is with point-smoothing for round points on non-nVidia cards (and 10.2.6? [doesn't 10.2.6 claim to fix things regarding nVidia cards and OpenGL?]). I've been running tests with various people, where they run an app that draws a point that is supposed to be rounded, using blending, and point smoothing. So far, the only people who get round points are those with nVidia geForce cards. Those with ATI and Radeon cards get square points for some reason. Any idea what is up? Could it be the pixel format? Thanks.

[NCarter]

ATI cards have never supported round points on the Mac. I believe the hardware actually does support this feature but the drivers don't, but I can't confirm that.

I gave up on points in the end and just used billboard quads with a texture instead. It doesn't seem to be any slower, it allows you to have any dot shape you like, and it works on all cards, so to my mind it's a better solution.

My thread relating to this problem is here (http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2020) - I used the tutorial recommended by OneSadCookie.

[MacFiend]

Yea I decided to just go ahead with quads and textures. I must say, textured quads for particles looks 100x better than just regular rounded points. Thanks.