My setup: Notebook Amilo XA2528 with win vista Geforce 8600M GS, 256 mbyte After having programmed my opengl 2dengine for a long time, I felt it was time to dig into gpu programming to get better performance and for some nice effects! I found out about Rendermonkey and tried it out just to test some features and so on. I loaded up some examples and they compiled just fine with no errors, but then - they all turn up blank! The preview-window shows nothing, it's just totally black. I can turn on the boundingbox and triad and stuff, but there is no content. I have not tested all examples, but I have tested most of them, and only the FUR demo I can get to work... somehow? I don't think it looks right. It seems like some functions is missing from it, as there is no smoothness to it. look: I fired up glew, and it tells me that OpenGL version 2.1.1 is supported and the shader stuff looks fine. Any ideas? =(

I don't know what it's supposed to look like, but that screenshot of a fur shader looks vaguely right. Its based on shells and the more shells you have the smoother it will be, add more shell layers and it will look smoother.

Augh! I was using the wrong examples. :S
Using the GL2 ones everything works fine!

Thanks V-man and Moomin!

Sry for digging out this old thread, but today I encountered a similar problem when I tried RenderMonkey's OGLES 2.0 shader examples and also found a workaround for this issue in the web.

I wrote a little C++ program and OpenGL ES 2.0 with some simple shaders and everything works fine (using GLES emulator), the very primitive shader runs perfectly.
As the next step I wanted to do some shader prototyping using RenderMonkey but I had always a blank preview window for the OGLES 2.0 examples - the DirectX HLSL and 'Desktop'-OpenGL examples worked very nicely instead.

This issue may occur when using newer NVidia graphic cards / drivers - I tested and confirmed this issue with a GTX285 and a GT220. As a workaround one may use the NVidia's NVEmulate tool to set the GLSL compiler device support to NV40.

The tool should be available at http://developer.nvidia.com/nvemulate.