If you're just making games, you should just use one of the many free, cross-platform rendering engines (OGRE3D, Irrlicht, etc.) or a comprehensive game-maker (

If you're just making games, you should just use one of the many free, cross-platform rendering engines (OGRE3D, Irrlicht, etc.) or a comprehensive game-maker (Unity or UDK). Both of these options abstract away OpenGL, Direct3D, shader implementations, extensions, etc. I have wasted a pretty huge amount of my life writing engine code when I don't much care for engine problems and know someone else will be able to write something that performs better and has a good-enough API.