I, I have been using SDL for a bit, and started playing with SDL + OpenGL as well but that was about a couple months ago, before school started and all Game programming is kinda like a hobby, and a dream, I started off trying to make a game that i would enjoy, but soon enough I found out that I could using games to send powerful messages and do a lot of other unintended things (I find games can be the most impactful media there is, if you design it properly) so I would really want to release my game when I finish (and hopefully, make some money from it, or break even) I am pretty set that my game would be in isometric, but I would like it to be as graphically appealing as possible (without using much of 3D effects, I was kinda thinking using openGL for lighting) since I understand that people judge a game by its graphics a lot. I was gonna go with openGl because of its speed and the lighting effect I can get from using it. However, I did some reading on openGL 3.0 today and it seems that the drawing primitives such as begin/end and some vertex array(I didn't fully understand them yet) are being depreciated and would be removed sometime in the future, but nobody's what will be removed when, so I'd like to play it safe (at least I think thats what the specs pdf said). I guess that means my game won't run on hardwares that enables opengL 3.0 support if they removed it(I used begin/end quite often in my code), and that is my delimma. As of now, I don't have too much time on my hands, game developing is like a spare time thing, so I'm projecting maybe another 3-5 years before I can finally finish it, or even more, considering I can be lazy at times. That is why I'm concerned with the compatibility, I don't want to finally finish developing a game that won't run on any computers. So I'm thinking about using purely SDL again, but I'm concerned about its speed limitations. What do you guys suggest me to do? Stick with OpenGL and use other methods for putting surface on a texture? or keep doing what I was doing? or just use pure SDL etc...? Basically, I'm hoping to get opinions from you guys who have more experience and expertise on this matter, I'm not even sure if I was reading the openGL 3.0 specs correctly, nor am i sure about the hardware part, this was all new knowledge to me. So please, leave some suggestions, I'd really appreciate that.

Stick with OpenGL, since accelerated graphics does give you a lot more power to do whatever you want (lighting, transparency, rotation, etc). When the Begin/End immediate mode is discarded, this will only mean you won't be able to use it with the latest OpenGL features. It will continue to be supported via wrapper libraries, so that all the other old games and applications that use it can still be run.