No its been supported for a while now, vertex texture lookup.

As for point sprites they are very useful in billboarding techniques. At least twice as fast as implementation on the CPU.

By the way gl_points doesnt work any better, i reverted to that when troubles began...

You're right, VTF does appear to be supported on the 8600 (though not, for some reason, on the GeForce 7s on Tiger. Hard to tell on Leopard since all the renderers claim to support it, presumably falling back to software most of the time).

I'd suggest you try rendering quads instead. Speed is no use to you at all if you crash That way you'll find out if it's a shader bug or a point bug at least...

I hear you, thats why i reverted back to drawing gl_points. I know its lame but i need speed. Im more concerned with the FBO results the graphics are nice but the simulation is most important. I try to strive for a balance in the simulation, those gl_points look pretty crappy!

Here are some pics with, havent updated with the Coronal Mass Ejection. Should have some pics up in a couple days.

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~eliuk

Was doing some performance testing on my old nvidia 7900 under linux. Damn vertex texture fetch (VTF) are expensive on this card. 10 times slower than the 8600m GT 256Mb and 13 slower than the quadro fx 5600 1.5Gb. Damn!!! I like this uniform shader architecture...

Some what related to the post, :-)