Structure
OpenGL, originally designed for then-powerful SGI workstations, includes a number of features, like stereo rendering and the "imaging subset", that were generally considered of limited utility for games - although stereoscopic gaming has drawn a lot more interest as of 2011. The API as a whole contains about 250 calls, but only a subset of perhaps 100 are useful for game development. However, no official gaming-specific subset was ever defined. MiniGL, released by 3Dfx as a stopgap measure to support glQuake, might have served as a starting point, but additional features like stencil were soon adopted by games, and support for the entire OpenGL standard continued. Today, workstations and consumer machines use the same architectures and operating systems, and so modern incarnations of the OpenGL standard still include these features, although only special workstation-class video cards accelerate them.
Read more about this topic: Comparison Of OpenGL And Direct3D
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