Quote Originally Posted by yotambien View Post
I guess it makes sense. But wouldn't a more straightforward explanation be that in the past there were no OpenGL drivers shipped by default with Windows XP? I think you only got them once you downloaded the drivers from the manufacturer site, and probably many people that would potentially use Google Earth would not know anything about this. Nowadays Vista and W7 have OpenGL drivers included by default, so this would not be an issue with these systems.
Could be. Then again, OpenGL seems to be the default setting, so maybe it's just a plain old driver issue as usual (it is OpenGL we are speaking about, after all).

Vista/Win7 emulate OpenGL 1.4 via D3D by default. Better than XP (OpenGL 1.1 without hardware acceleration), but still far from good. To get real OpenGL support, you still need to install ICD drivers from the IHV's homepage (windows update won't install OpenGL ICDs).