So what are the new functions in OpenGL 3.0 you may ask?

OpenGL 3.0 increase the overall required set of functionality for any product advertising support for this latest spec revision. For instance:

• There is an improved mechanism to manage vertex buffer memory which enables applications to avoid costly back and forth through the PCIe bus, or to serialize CPU and GPU processing.
• Offscreen rendering capability is now a first class citizen, with an efficient mechanism to copy surfaces and use multi-sampled buffers, which should make rendering to shadow maps much more efficient.
• One of the key new feature is the support for the shader model available on all the recently released GPU, with full integer support. This lets application developpers write more natively their code instead of working around previous generation limited support for integer/float operations.

You can find the full list of new features and the latest OpenGL 3.0 specification at www.opengl.org. Full driver support will be available in the next few months from most hardware vendors and lot of large software companies have stated support for it in their next releases. Large subsets of the functionality is already exposed in currently shipping drivers, although the 3.0 logo will only by advertised once that becomes 100%.

As with most things in life, you will not know all the benefits until its been used in action in a bunch of applications. What I find quite interesting is that the standard has been set by companies in competition with each other. It takes relevant hardware, a modern API, but the most importantly it needs to be implemented in the application software to move forward the technology.