Ya you are right. I was startled to see I got down voted for my comment, but realized that there is quite a bit of context I skipped over. I've rewritten things for OpenGL 3 times now: once for Mac OS, once for iOS ES1 and once for iOS ES2. Then I scrapped it all and wrote some small wrappers so I could use the same code between iOS and Mac OS. We have everything defined in macros, for example MY_glGenFramebuffers() to map similar code to glGenFramebuffers() and glGenFramebuffersOES(). Unfortunately there are some iOS-specific calls that tie a render buffer's backing store to a UIView's memory so it's difficult to make a perfect wrapper. It feels like most of my day to day work now is just slogging through subtle issues with render and stencil buffers, and tweaking the shaders to even get 15 fps on older iOS devices. I get very little "actual work" done on any given day with OpenGL anymore. I don't think that it's gone the direction that it was originally intended to go. I just mean, I think OpenGL started with a scientific or mathematical approach and it's become kind of a catch-all or least common denominator for wherever the industry is going. So for example you really have to use one giant texture and one shader to do all of your work, because context switches are incredibly expensive on iOS. This doesn't make sense to me though because reading from a different texture address should be practically a free operation. My hunch is that they left off some critical piece of hardware, maybe a memory controller, or they didn't write a very good driver, so changing textures or shaders has to move a lot of data in and out of registers. I realize this is for cell phones and the hardware really is puny, but I don't think it would have been that expensive to give the hardware/drivers just that little bit of extra power to take the burden off developers. So that's what I meant about passing the buck. It's hard to explain my reasoning for all of this so I guess I came across as trollish.