Graphics hardware has rapidly evolved from simple accelerated
framebuffer devices up to modern day general purpose GPUs with
programmable pipelines. As such, the OpenGL API that first appeared
in 1992 encourages a programming style that works very poorly (from
a performance perspective) on modern hardware. Subsequent revisions
of the API have steadily removed obsolete methods of programming
to focus on providing a small and simple interface to the extremely
general programming model that modern graphics hardware allows.