On GL 3.x+ this isn't needed at all and on older hardware it causes performance issues, in particular with hires textures due to impossibility of precaching.
In addition it forces some really awkward handling of lighting for things that have their own color, like stenciled sprites or particles.
With this special case gone it will be possible to handle this case in a saner manner than it is right now.
As compensation for older hardware a fullscreen blend will be drawn over the entire screen. This won't be 100% accurate but it's preferable to keeping the current method.
This means it won't work anymore on anything that doesn't support OpenGL 4.0, but I don't think this is a problem. On older NVidia cards performance gains could not be seen and on older AMDs using the vertex buffer was even worse as long as it got mixed with immediate mode rendering.
- removed gl_vid_compatibility. With the bump to 1.4 no hardware requiring this flag is supported anymore.
- disabled 16 bit framebuffers for the same reason. As a conseqence all code for rendering without stencil could also be removed.
