You still have to write an absurd amount of spaghetti code around testing GL extensions that are available. Especially when you consider the Intel IGPUs from the last 5 years - the first gen is only 2.1, second gen 3.1, and Ivy Bridge and above is 4.3. But besides those the Nvidia / AMD parts have supported 3.3 and above since 2006.

Of course, if you are targeting Windows XP... you got to think back a lot further than that. In some ways theres some elegance in how you can write GLES2 shader code and have it run everywhere, including on mobile, and just check extensions for everything else you use.

That's true if you want to support older OGL versions.

Personally I use the ES3 subset of 4.3 right now. Same code works perfectly on ES3 mobile HW and 4.3 desktop HW. The only features it lacks are geometry and tesselation shaders.

I'm also using compute shaders right now, even though they are not supported in ES3 they are going to be supported in the ES next update. And that gives me effectively everything geometry shaders etc can ever bring.

By using those I'm saved from checking any extensions. And there is not much they could even bring to the table.

> The only features it lacks are geometry and tesselation shaders.

fp64, draw_indirect, multi_draw_indirect, shader_buffer_load, bindless_texture.

These are all killer features in writing fast renderers.