GLES2 vs GLES3 in 2020+

Question

My question is generally, what are the pros and cons of GLES2 and GLES3 in the current day and age? Everything from performance (where GLES3 should lead) to device support (which GLES2 should lead, but how far behind is GLES3?).

I can't seem to find something like https://caniuse.com/ that shows how well supported GLES3 is across various devices as compared to GLES2, and so to be careful I'm making all my projects GLES2 only. As far as I know though, I'm holding myself back from quite a few things (shaders and particles are the ones I've specifically noticed).

But if I were to choose GLES3 what would happen? Is GLES2 used if GLES3 isn't supported? Would my Particles2D convert to CPUParticles2D automatically or would I have to make a GLES2 and a GLES3 build of my game (or maybe have my particles in a scene that has both a Particles2D and a CPUParticles2D and I'd switch which to use based on the GLES version).

Any other information people could provide on the effective differences between GLES2 and GLES3, how they approach the topic for their own games, and etc... it would be greatly appreciated!

Comments

If anyone has feedback on the question rather than downvotes, it'd be very helpful. Still very curious for an answer. Not sure if this is a situation where opinions / anecdotes are the answer instead of some straight answer to a question, and so people don't prefer it.

If that's the case I'd just want to know whether there's a better place to ask this sort of question. I still think there can be some solid answers to this question though, for example if anyone were to know of a site like caniuse but for game graphics.

Answer 1

The docs have a page on this: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/misc/gles2_gles3_differences.html