>>6
Nix the Ogre3D, gotcha. Their plugs on Youtube seemed a little... meh.
D3d11, I'll definitely look into that.
I've found some awesome tutorials for OpenGL basics on Xoax.net using VC++ 2010. Things have been going smoothly, especially since the geometry concepts are the same (points, polygons, strips, what have you) as in J3d. I'll probably stick with this for now and double check the version when I get home, I'm away from my personal computer at the moment.
GPGPU? First time hearing about it ( I don't play a whole lot of games that aren't free or open-source - no I'm not poor or a freeloader, I just really like the creativity and the community behind most open projects. The fact that it's free is just a plus. My second home page is Google Code. Get at me). Though it definitely sounds appealing, I used to play around with assembly back in middle school, hacking cheap flash games with CheatEngine.
Thanks for the advice, anon. /prog/ is proving to be a much more productive resource then those lame ass forums, I'm sold.
And panning out, though it's cool to know where the latest and greatest games are getting their guts from, a big part of me has nostalgia for low-end graphics. Probably just me wishing that I was born sooner to see all the Atari stuff roll out. Though I'm not thinking *that* archaic - I am talking about working in 3d here, after all. My imagination is definitely thinking something along the lines of a hybrid. Perhaps N64 style. I'll see how it goes.