I read this post yesterday on Google+ that talked about the increased smoothness of animations due to the adaption of OpenGL ES 2.0 in the version of Compiz in Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 1. I was curious if anyone knew what graphics chipsets support this and will see the improvements.
Thanks,
the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification are written considering the OpenGL 2.0 specification with some variations. If your purpose is to detect which version of OpenGL you have available in your video card you can use the mesa utils:
when the installation is complete run
the output of this command gives you information about the OpenGL profile available in your video card, since, as i just say, the OpenGL ES 2.0 are basically OpenGL 2.0 with minor modifications if you have a profile number greater then 2 you probably can experience the new interface without problems; the real problems is that some feature of the ES 2.0 are designed differently from the original 2.0, so if this developer does not gives more information we are not able to give a precise answer.
Generally speaking the same profile is usually used in all modern web-browser except Safari, so if you can play some GL demo in your web broser you are probably fine with ES 2.0 in every scenario.
The answer is also tricky because with some OpenGL version you can create a layer of abstraction and assign all the calculus to the CPU (meaning that you can play even without a dedicated GPU, or the required GPU for the hardware acceleration version), like in some older games where you can choose between "hardware acceleration" or "software emulation" in the graphics settings; if the dev team can't provide much more data is almost impossible to give a correct answer, it's only possible to give to you an idea of what OpenGL ES 2.0 are and how they are used and what are their general requirements.