When suddenly.....OpenGL 4.0 !

http://www.betanews.com/article/In-a-more-complicated-gaming-world-OpenGL-40-gets-simpler-smarter/12
68348226

http://www.opengl.org/registry/

Direct link to spec with changes marked.

After a very quick look these are the main differences I see:

-Added tessellation shaders. They make it easier to support level-of-detal rendering where objects look good when they are near and they have less polygons when they are far away to save computation. See also.

-Added support for double-precision data in the shaders. This will allow for more accurate computations -- not sure how much this will be used in games.

-Per-sample shading. This will improve antialiasing - making edges look smoother.

There are quite a few changes in there. Some of them seem to be targeted to make it easier to port Direct3D games/apps onto OpenGL. A potential boon for developers.

Also, DirectX sucks

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX

>>1
I don't think it's an argument to say "do not use DX10/11, because 50% of all the gamers are still using Windows XP (which only supports DX9)", but to claim on the other hand "OpenGL is ultra portable, you know, for the millions of gamers who actually use linux and/or mac".