I’m the project manager of the Open Source Crystal Space 3D Engine (http://crystal.linuxgames.com). One of the targets of that engine is OpenGL. But I’m having a great deal of trouble trying to please all different (non-conformant) OpenGL cards and drivers. Some cards support stencil, some don’t. Some crash when rendering geometry after z-plane, some don’t. Some correctly report maximum supported texture size, some don’t.
Basically I would like to know if there is a list of known caveats and other issues with all/most current 3D cards. Especially from the point of view of OpenGL.
However I think that list would be quite huge, since it also need to keep track of different driver versions (i.e. the Matrox G400 drivers gave me a headache).
I think that if the cards are still being sold (even old supported ones, like the Rage Pro family), then some of these issues should be reported, and hopefully fixed, since they sound like bugs.
Also note that all cards support stencil using software rendering, and there’s no simply way to know if you’re using software rendering or not (for example, GeForce family in 16 bit mode will use software rendering when stencil is enabled).
