OpenGL 4.3

Been reading through the spec and some of the changes; this is very very good stuff indeed and goes a long way towards removing or resolving much of what's left that I personally find nasty about GL.  There are a few things still (getting rid of bind-to-modify remains the big one, unfortunately, but I don't see that happening until at least GL5), and the driver situation remains to be fully seen, of course, but overall GL is now getting real close to the stage where I could almost consider ditching D3D.

It's an unfortunate accident of history that GL started out as by far the superior (and nicer) API, went completely off to la-la land with versions 1.5, 2.0 and 2.1, and has taken so many revisions to pull it back to a stage where it is nearly there again.  In many ways it's still nicer than D3D, but in many of the more important ways it became a horrible pain to use, with it's handling of buffer objects and shaders being especially awful.  D3D, despite it's own fair share of nastiness, was always much better in these key areas.

Since I'm now in AMD land I need to wait on driver support before I can start playing with the new functionality (most of it is available as extensions for older hardware), but hopefully that won't be too long.  I'll likely write some more on it when the time comes.