Modern OpenGL exploits immutable data for parallelism all over the place. It also lets (and expects!) you to upload model data (vertices, colors, texture-coord

Modern OpenGL exploits immutable data for parallelism all over the place. It also lets (and expects!) you to upload model data (vertices, colors, texture-coords, etc) to the GPU, so you only need to re-upload things that have changed. You can even stream textures asynchronously using PBOs (pixel buffer objects), and use dual PBOs like double buffers (or using copy-on-write techniques to only re-upload dirty rectangles...)