How well are point sprites supported these days?

[elias4444]

I'm trying to optimize my particle effects engine, and was wondering how safe it would be to use point sprites as the default method. Are they pretty well supported? And if so, should I use the point sprites in openGL 2.0, or the ARB extension?

[Ciardhubh]

I asked myself a similar question but since I will probably use OpenGL2.0 anyway (because of shaders), I didn't go into too much detail.

DirectX 8 introduced point sprites to DirectX. DX8 cards were released around 2002 according to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ATI_Graphics_Processing_Units
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_NVIDIA_Graphics_Processing_Units

GL_ARB_point_sprite was approved in 2003.

According to the two lists, Nvidia cards came with full OpenGL2.0 support in 2004; ATI was faster.

There doesn't seem to be a big gap between the ARB extension approval (approval doesn't mean it's been implemented already) and OpenGL2.0 support by major cards. Since point sprites have been in both graphics apis for some time, I would expect them to be well supported. Of course this doesn't tell you how they compare performance-wise but it's a start

[Rainer]

I use arb_point_sprite for my particles, and it works fine on most systems.
You should check if it's supported by the graphics card at startup...

if(!(GLContext.getCapabilities().GL_ARB_point_sprite && GLContext.getCapabilities().GL_ARB_point_parameters)){
   System.out.println("ARB_point_sprite not supported");
}