OpenGL ES versus OpenGL

Question

What are the differences between OpenGL ES and OpenGL ?

Answer 1

I think you'll get a better answer if you ask "what are the differences between OpenGL and OpenGL ES ".

There are profound differences between OpenGL ES 1.1 and ES 2.0, OpenGL 1.5 and 2.0, and OpenGL 3.0 and 4.0.

As others have described ES was written for embedded systems. It also represents the first "house cleaning" of the GL specification since its inception. OpenGL had a) many ways to do the same thing (e.g. you could draw a quad/rect two different ways and blit a pixel image two different ways, etc). ES is simpler than OpenGL with fewer features as a general statement because it's designed for less sophisticated hardware.

I urge you not to look at OpenGL ES 1.1 as it is the past and does not represent the way OpenGL or OpenGL ES is moving architecturally in the future.