The present and the future is a post by id Software lead programmer John Carmack in this Slashdot thread on the subject of What is Happening with OpenGL?, discussing the relative merits of the 3D graphics APIs Direct3D and OpenGL (thanks Jacek Fedoryñski). Topics include recent improvements to Direct3D, the viability of ports to the Mac and Linux platforms (on which there's another brief comment here), the features and extensions of each API, and an outlook on the future. Here's a quote from that part:

We are rapidly approaching a real golden age for graphics programming. Currently, cards and API's are a complex mess of hundreds of states and function calls, but the next two years will see the addition of the final primitive functionality needed to allow arbitrarily complex operations with graceful performance degradation.

At that point, a higher level graphics API will finally make good sense. There is debate over exactly what it is going to look like, but the model will be like C. Just like any CPU can compile any C program (with various levels of efficiency), any graphics card past this point will be able to run any shader. Some hardware vendors are a bit concerned about this, because bullet point features that you have that the other guy doesn't are a major marketing feature, but the direction is a technical inevitability. They will just have to compete on price and performance. Oh, darn.