Hmm, well giving it thought the one feature I just can't justify loosing are Uniform Buffer Objects (change once, applies to all shaders that use it opposed to setting uniforms for each single shader. Think of them like a single instance of a customizable record that you can share across multiple shaders) which were introduced in GL3.1, so I'll do some damage control and see how much work it would represent to make 3.1 the lower dependancy. You made an excellent point about sandy bridge : I was not aware that the on-chip graphics were 3.1/3.2, I assumed 2.1. For that reason I shall have to look into it, I can sit pretty knowing that cheap 4.x cards will soon dominate but that on-die intel monstrosity is going to be the only solution a lot of laptop users will have for the next few years.
Carver : I wouldn't like to offend those pursuing ES as their route to GL3/4 will be a lot easier than those coding in immediate mode 2.x, but yes I'd agree with that statement. It's not just the performance gains but it's the usability too.
My terrain engine was nearly effortless with GL4.0.
LOD, low level culling etc are all done on the GPU and as a result can sit exactly where they need to for the simplest approach. Older CLOD systems (Roam etc) are far more complex, doing all they can to minimize the bottleneck of constantly transfering vertices to the card from the system. That's just not an issue with tesselation; you just send a sparse patch mesh and tesselation+displacment does the rest with, more or less, free seamless welding of patch edges.
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