Eh, a lot of the recent articles on hackernews about GL have been fairly low-quality and were badly researched (like the guy who complained about timer queries blocking, because he blatantly didn't understand how CPU/GPU communication works) No need to buy into the FUD.
- if you use core profile, modern GL, there aren't a lot of quirks. It's a fairly nice API overall.
- if you target reasonably modern drivers, you won't typically find many inconsistencies and issues. If you do something unusual (like the latest idtech with megatexture) you might run into driver issues -- but that's just how things are, it's not the fault of the API. New functionality needs testing, and GPUs are still constantly evolving.
- extensions are not useless. There are a huge amount of absolutely fantastic extensions. This is, IMO, the main strength of GL over D3D (and other APIs), which does not have a mechanism like this. If you know the hardware supports a certain functionality, there will most certainly be a GL extension to exploit that functionality, even if you can't with D3D.
- in particular, KHR_debug is the best thing since sliced bread. It allows you to have the GPU driver diagnose your program for you, and give you hints such as:
- things you do wrong
- things you should do differently to increase performance
- general debug information
- information on memory usage and where your buffers are stored
- if you use core profile, modern GL, there aren't a lot of quirks. It's a fairly nice API overall.
- if you target reasonably modern drivers, you won't typically find many inconsistencies and issues. If you do something unusual (like the latest idtech with megatexture) you might run into driver issues -- but that's just how things are, it's not the fault of the API. New functionality needs testing, and GPUs are still constantly evolving.
- extensions are not useless. There are a huge amount of absolutely fantastic extensions. This is, IMO, the main strength of GL over D3D (and other APIs), which does not have a mechanism like this. If you know the hardware supports a certain functionality, there will most certainly be a GL extension to exploit that functionality, even if you can't with D3D.
- in particular, KHR_debug is the best thing since sliced bread. It allows you to have the GPU driver diagnose your program for you, and give you hints such as:
- things you do wrong
- things you should do differently to increase performance
- general debug information
- information on memory usage and where your buffers are stored