if a desktop machine supports OpenGL 3.0+ I can assume that it supports OpenGL ES 2.0 too?

Question

This isn't clear for me, if i use the drivers from the GPU manufacturer and they support OpenGL 3.0 and/or above, i can always make an OpenGL ES 2.0 application work?

Answer 1

What do you mean by "make an OpenGL ES 2.0 application work?" If you mean, "Can I modify it to run on a desktop GL 3.x context with relatively minimal effort", then the answer is, "it depends". Obviously you'll need to change the version declaration of shaders, and your texture uploads may well be slower. ES 2.0 programs often use PVR compressed textures, which generally are not supported on desktop GL hardware.

A bigger problem is with binary shaders. Even if an implementation supports the ES2_compatibility extension, there's no guarantee that the implementation will support the specific binary shader formats that the program requires. So your program should be using text shaders.

Also, don't make a core or forward-compatible 3.x context; use the compatibility profile instead.

But if you have some executable that uses ES 2.0, you cannot simply run it on a desktop GL 3.x computer and expect it to work.