News is bouncing around today that the current test version of Mac OS X 10.6.3 has OpenGL 3.0 installed in it, and while it's not completely working yet, developers are hopeful that this means Apple is pushing to have full OpenGL 3.0 support in place as soon as possible. What does that mean for us mere users? Better, faster graphics, and the ability to push the hardware we've already paid for to where it's supposed to be. Most of the hardware sold in modern Macs actually has the ability to make use of OpenGL 3.0 (in fact, the current version is actually 3.2, and 3.0 was released back in 2008), but Apple's never included it in the software.

It's a strange thing, this hesitance Apple has to really push the graphics ability on these machines to the limit. They've kept things slower than they could be in other ways as well, for reasons we're not entirely sure of. It just doesn't seem like faster 3D is a priority for them -- we'll leave it up to you to decide whether that's good or bad.