[Pharo-project] Athens OpenGL backend - what does it mean?

Hello Pharo Devs, I am really excited about the direction Pharo is taking regarding many areas - one of them being the graphics. I played with Athens a bit and it's cool to see anti-aliased vectror graphics coming to Pharo. I keep reading about a possible OpenGL back-end in the future... what would this mean exactly? For years I have been "dreaming" about graphic-accelerated "eye-candy" effects inside of the Smalltalk environment. Like compiz-fusion effects in Linux, or Quartz-Extreme powerded in OS-X (Exposé, etc.). Would this be possible with such a back-end? Or am I misinterpreting things? I'm not a graphic-dev expert. Best regards, Sebastian