Actually much of the implementation between the pipelines is shared,
only the native part that deals with particular API is different.
So we do get the benefit of stable opengl pipeline code.
Good to know that not a lot engineering-effort was duplicated

The problem is that it appears that the manifacturers aren't that
interested in quality opengl drivers on Windows - and only enough
that big game titles work well. Unfortunately our stuff doesn't
necessarily benefit from improvements made for games.
There are big questions about future opengl viability on Windows.
Well the problem is some kind of chicken-egg. Almost nobody uses OpenGL on windows because hardware-support is bad, and hardware support is bad because nobody really uses it.
My hope was that java would be some of those "law breakers", although I can understand that from Sun's POV its much more improtant to be commercially sucessful than to help OpenGL

Hey, no problems - you are entitled to asking these questions, you will be using
this stuff (whether you want it or not =) . And these are legitimate concerns.
Well I want to use it of course and I am happy about the big leap foreward by jdk6uN.
Although its dangerous to introduce such changes in an update release - Java is a bit late in the battle for desktop - so the descision to do all this stuff in an JDK-update release is what I call brave. Only the naming is in my opinion confusing - wouldn't be Java-6.1 exactly what everybody would expect?
Well wel all know Sun's management only exist to confuse consumers and developers

Thanks for all your effort, lg Clemens