You first need to understand that opengl specification are not made to be easy to use, but efficient. And the api design is highly constraint by the hardware. You also need to understand that opengl 1.3 is FCKING 11 YEARS OLD !
Back in the day you had immediate mode. You first call glBegin, then make one call to glVertex for each vertex and finally call glEnd. So if you want to render one frame of a cube, that's 1+6*4+1=26 calls, and for each call your cpu send data to the graphic card.
There are two huge problems with that : you need to the transfer the same vertex data to the graphic card for each frame and your cpu processing power limit your graphic card processing power (because cpu calls take way more time than your graphic card takes to render a vertex).
Why was it designed like that in the first place if it's inefficient ? Easy : there were no graphic card. All the 3D rendering was done by the cpu.
So with the development of more powerful graphic card, they updated the specification. With the new api you allocate memory buffers of vertex directly on your graphic card memory and you just need to call one function to render the whole buffer. So you don't need to transfer all the vertex data at each frame, and you don't need to do gazillion of function calls to render a cube.
THIS WAS IN 2004 !
So when the khronos consortium (just a reminder, the "idiots" are : Apple, AMD/ATI, Nvidia, Intel, Google, Id Software, ...) decided in 2007 to make a mobile version (ES stand for embedded system) of opengl, did they choose to base their api on something conceived in 1992 and dropped in 2004 ?
OF COURSE NOT !
But why not keep it compatible ? Well it's a waste of time. Developers shouldn't use deprecated functionality since 2004 in 2012, especially when it's highly inefficient.
This guy need to grow up, understand that opengl ES main objective is not screensavers, understand that he sometimes need to update a little bit his programming knowledge and acknowledge that he's not an expert in the very complex field of gpu.
Yeah you're right, they were graphic cards, my bad, I made a shortcut.
But at the time (1992), opengl implementations were mostly on the cpu (except for SGI graphic cards that were reserved to professionals). And the graphic card processing power was not enough to make the cpu a bottleneck.
You missed a key point: with OpenGL 1.3 you don't need to follow the glBegin/glVertex/glEnd paradigm. You can create a display list or you can use vertex arrays. In fact the reason for including display lists in the first place was to make it so you didn't have to send one vertex at a time.
I don't agree with JWZ, regardless. OpenGL ES was a good simplification to the overall system. But he is right in that an optional compatibility layer that lives on top of OpenGL ES would have kept the original API valid for those who need it (and without slowing down the core of OpenGL ES).
You first need to understand that opengl specification are not made to be easy to use, but efficient. And the api design is highly constraint by the hardware. You also need to understand that opengl 1.3 is FCKING 11 YEARS OLD !
Back in the day you had immediate mode. You first call glBegin, then make one call to glVertex for each vertex and finally call glEnd. So if you want to render one frame of a cube, that's 1+6*4+1=26 calls, and for each call your cpu send data to the graphic card. There are two huge problems with that : you need to the transfer the same vertex data to the graphic card for each frame and your cpu processing power limit your graphic card processing power (because cpu calls take way more time than your graphic card takes to render a vertex).
Why was it designed like that in the first place if it's inefficient ? Easy : there were no graphic card. All the 3D rendering was done by the cpu.
So with the development of more powerful graphic card, they updated the specification. With the new api you allocate memory buffers of vertex directly on your graphic card memory and you just need to call one function to render the whole buffer. So you don't need to transfer all the vertex data at each frame, and you don't need to do gazillion of function calls to render a cube. THIS WAS IN 2004 !
So when the khronos consortium (just a reminder, the "idiots" are : Apple, AMD/ATI, Nvidia, Intel, Google, Id Software, ...) decided in 2007 to make a mobile version (ES stand for embedded system) of opengl, did they choose to base their api on something conceived in 1992 and dropped in 2004 ? OF COURSE NOT !
But why not keep it compatible ? Well it's a waste of time. Developers shouldn't use deprecated functionality since 2004 in 2012, especially when it's highly inefficient.
This guy need to grow up, understand that opengl ES main objective is not screensavers, understand that he sometimes need to update a little bit his programming knowledge and acknowledge that he's not an expert in the very complex field of gpu.
tldr; he's the idiot