The first major addition to OpenGL ES 3.0 is support for a number of buffer formats, alongside a general tightening up of the buffer format specifications. Strictly Defined Pixel/Uniform/Frame Buffer Objects If you only implement the baseline OpenGL ES 3.0 feature set, then it won’t be enough for D3D 10_0 compliance. Consequently, this is why some mobile GPUs like Adreno 320 can support OpenGL ES 3.0, but not D3D feature level 10_0. So if we had to place OpenGL ES 3.0 along a Direct3D continuum, as it’s primarily based on OpenGL 3.1, it would be somewhere between Direct3D feature level 9_3 and feature level 10_0, again primarily due to a lack of geometry shaders. From a major feature perspective OpenGL did not reach parity with Direct3D 10 until OpenGL 3.2, which among other things introduced geometry shader support.

Direct3D of course had a major reachitecting with Direct3D 10 back in 2007, which added a number of features to the API while giving Microsoft a chance to clean out a great deal of fixed-function legacy cruft. On that note, though drawing a comparison to Direct3D isn’t particularly straightforward, since we get asked about it so much we’ll try to answer it. In terms of backwards compatibility only OpenGL 4.3 is a complete superset of OpenGL ES 3.0, but for most purposes OpenGL 3.1 is probably the closest desktop OpenGL specification.

In terms of functionality, OpenGL ES 3.0 is largely a mobile implementation of the OpenGL 3.3 feature set, with a couple notable features missing and a few additional features plucked from later revisions of OpenGL. In conjunction with next-generation GPUs, OpenGL ES 3.0 will make a number of new features available to mobile and embedded devices.

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