Something exciting for OpenGL programmers.....

OpenGL 2.x and 3.0 APIs arrive this year....
Longs Peak and Mount Evans represent major API upgrade. What is going on with OpenGL right now is very exciting. This year will see two new versions of this venerable API. The first version due in July 2007 is Longs Peak (OpenGL 2.x). This is a major clean-up of the code after almost a decade and a half. Approximately three months after that we will see the release of Mount Evans (OpenGL 3.0) which will run specifically on hardware born after November 8th, 2006. We are talking about DirectX 10-class hardware, bringing all the features of unified 3D architecture to the world of OpenGL. Mount Evans is compatible with Longs Peak, but you will require OpenGL 3.0 class hardware to run everything.

OpenGL 3.0 will offer features such as instanced rendering, stream out of vertex data to a buffer, texture buffer objects, numerous new texture formats and so on. Most importantly the Khronos Group is linking OpenGL and OpenGL ES, a mobile 3D graphics API via COLLADA and glFX, so what is supported in OpenGL 3.0 will see the light of the day in ES version as well.