OpenGL 2.0 has now been formally launched at the SIGGRAPH 2004 industry tradeshow in Los Angeles ( August 10, 2004 ).

OpenGL 2.0 is completely backward compatible with the previous versions of OpenGL.

About OpenGL: It's an idenpendant platform and open ( as the name describes ) 2D and 3D standard introduced by SGI in 1992, It's widely used, supported on a very wide variety of platforms and It has more than 60 hardware developer licenses.

Click on Read more for read about new features on OpenGL 2.0

Programmable shading. With the new release, both OpenGL Shading Language and its APIs are now core features of OpenGL. New functionality includes the ability to create shader and program objects; and the ability to write vertex and fragment shaders in OpenGL Shading Language.

Multiple render targets that enable programmable shaders to write different values to multiple output buffers in a single pass.

Non-power-of-two textures for all texture targets, thereby supporting rectangular textures and reducing memory consumption.

Two-sided stencil, with the ability to define stencil functionality for the front and back faces of primitives, improving performance of shadow volume and constructive solid geometry rendering algorithms.

Point sprites, which replace point texture coordinates with texture coordinates interpolated across the point. This allows drawing points as customized textures, useful for particle systems.

More info on SGI press release

official OpenGL website