Display lists actually remind me a lot of sprite batching, where game engines also build up VBOs based on the whole scene. Probably not as common in 3D (maybe p

Display lists actually remind me a lot of sprite batching, where game engines also build up VBOs based on the whole scene. Probably not as common in 3D (maybe particles?) but standard practice for 2D. And for what it's worth, the last game engine I worked on used display lists for opaque objects as well as transparent- that let us sort by material (to reduce state changes) and approximate depth (to reduce overdraw). We just regenerated and sorted this list every frame from scratch.