I have added some command line options to hopefully help with our debugging problems. 1) Run without any shaders at all: GPU_physics_demo -s This should produce a grey screen with a neat grid of randomly coloured cubes that are sitting completely motionless. If this doesn't work then render-to-texture and shaders are not the problem and we have some very basic OpenGL problem to worry about. 2) Run with just one shader - but no render-to-texture: GPU_physics_demo -p Just like '-s', this should produce a grey screen with a neat grid of randomly coloured cubes that are sitting completely motionless. This time, the vertex shader is reading the positioning information from a texturemap. If this doesn't work then render-to-texture isn't the problem but something is amiss in shader-land. There are several possibilities - the nastiest of which might be that your graphics card/driver doesn't support floating point textures. (This is pretty much 'Game Over' for you because without that, doing physics in the GPU is going to be virtually impossible). 3) Run without vertex texturing: GPU_physics_demo -v On hardware that doesn't support vertex texturing, this flag is turned on by default (and things run about 5x slower!) Use this flag to force the software to run without vertex texturing on hardware that does actually support it. You can use this flag in conjunction with any of the others.