"Like it or lump it" is not a great advertising strategy :) I suspect the point about this subset-of-GL4 thing is that what you can rely on in practice is Open

"Like it or lump it" is not a great advertising strategy :) I suspect the point about this subset-of-GL4 thing is that what you can rely on in practice is OpenGL3, plus enough extensions to bring it up to something closer to OpenGL4. Take a look at the Unity3D hardware stats (http://stats.unity3d.com/index.html http://stats.unity3d.com/index.html) or the Steam hardware stats (http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/) - ~50% of the Unity market and ~25% of the Steam market is pre-DX11, which I believe limits it to OpenGL3 at most. I might agree that the the author of this piece is a bit careless about distinguishing between OpenGL as it is implemented and OpenGL as it is specified. Aside from the bind points nonsense, and the massive pile of random 16-bit values that is GLenum, the OpenGL spec doesn't actually require everything to be this total clusterfuck. I'm not aware of any specified reason why the GLSL compiler couldn't just as easily be a shared component (as it is in Direct3D), for example, and I don't recall the bit where the spec insists on shitty drivers. Still, we have to work with what's there, not with what should be there, and when what's there is a bit of a mess, it's absolutely fair to call it what it is.