Animating with OpenGL

The motivation to use OpenGL comes from the limitations of CPU processing power when we face a task to visualize millions of data points and do it fast (sometimes even in real time).

Modern computers have powerful GPUs that are made for fast visualization related computations (such as games), and there is no reason why they can't be used for scientific-related visualizations.

Actually, there is at least one drawback of writing the hardware accelerated software. As far as hardware dependency is concerned, modern graphic cards require proprietary drivers, sometimes not available on the target platform/machine (for example, user laptop); even when available, sometimes installing required dependencies on site is not what you want to spend your time on, while all you want is to present your findings and demonstrate your research results. This is not a show stopper but have this in mind, and measure benefits and costs of introducing this complexity in your project.

With caveats...