SDL 3.0 Drops Its OpenGL ES 1.0 Render Path

With SDL 3.0 in development and it taking a more modern focus and doing away with various pieces of old code, one of the latest chunks of code being retired is the OpenGL ES 1.0 2D render path.

OpenGL ES 1.0 is now nearly two decades old and was based on the original OpenGL 1.3 spec. OpenGL ES 1.0 is hardly relevant these days with OpenGL ES 2.0 having been out since 2007 and much more common in the embedded space and elsewhere. With SDL 3.0 trying to focus on modern tech for this cross-platform gaming software/hardware abstraction layer, it's certainly past time dropping the GLES 1.0 support.

With the commit removing the OpenGL ES 1.0 2D render path this week it was noted:

"In SDL3 we plan to make more use of shaders in the 2D render API, and this minimizes the number of platforms we have to consider for new features. OpenGL ES 2.0 or newer is supported on all modern iOS and Android devices."

Thus another 1k+ lines of code removed on top of the tens of thousands of lines of other old code already cleared out during this early stage of SDL 3.0 development.