I am currently taking a course called "Advanced Computer Graphics" where we play around with various techniques such as cloth simulation, fluid simulation, ray tracing, and other things. Our most recent homework involved working with stencil buffers (which I don't really understand that well) and working with vertex and fragment shaders.
For the hardware in the class, most have the laptops that the school offers which are Thinkpads with either nVidia or ATi hardware. I have a desktop and two eeePCs with Intel hardware and a school laptop with nVidia hardware (as well as two other boxes, but they don't run X).
Pretty much everyone got the shaders to work except for one part (noise3) which wasn't supported by anybody's machine except my desktop in hardware on on one Mac and my Thinkpad in software. After doing a little digging, it turns out that nVidia (which many people have in the class) will never have noise*() in hardware. Apparently performance matters more than correctness.
All this means is that I'll stick with Nouveau even harder now for the machines I have nVidia hardware in already and Intel hardware for new machines where possible.