OpenGL is actually pretty high-level. I don't know how much detail of the hardware it lets you get - probably mostly through hardware-specific extensions. The m

OpenGL is actually pretty high-level. I don't know how much detail of the hardware it lets you get - probably mostly through hardware-specific extensions. The most basic usage is really hardware oblivious. There are many even more high-level toolkits on top of that, such as Qt. But if you need some flexibility and performance, using OpenGL is probably your best bet.