Hummmm.... Lots of bugs in the Sun Bug Database related to its support of OpenGL: most complain that OpenGL was mainly tested by Sun on Windows only, but with much less efforts for Linux.

Support of OpenGL for Linux is very recent, but still bogous, only in Tiger beta, where this is the only "portable" solution to have hardware acceleration for Java2D, because there's no DirectX on Linux. On Linux, there's an alternate interface for hardware acceleration, DCA, but its support in Linux kernels is still too much embryonic and much less widespread than OpenGL.

So may be we could enable and try OpenGL on Linux only, where it significantly improves the display speed, but it will not work correctly before Java 1.5 is officially released, and it won't work with Java 1.3 which is shipped with most Linux installations (including RedHat and SuSE). I think it's safer to keep the default support through DirectX, which is the prefered interface for most games on Windows, and on which most manufacturers have invested their development efforts. OpenGL remains a secondary interface for Windows, and Microsoft offers very little help for its effective support.

For Mac OSX users, this is not an issue: Java2D is ported independantly by Apple using the Mac drivers architecture.

Look into the Sun Java Bug Database for "OpenGL ATI Java2D", you'll see lots of issues. ATI boards are very common on PCs (including GeForce and Radeon models), and it's up to Sun to find a reliable way to work with ATI's OpenGL drivers on Windows. For now it does not work reliably.

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