Well, graphics stuff is way outside of my expertise, but if I were to guess, the glowpoints code probably uses OpenGL 3-compatible shaders and thus presumably won't work with older graphics cards.
However, by the time the glowpoints code is ready to be committed to trunk, the rendering pipelines will probably already be divided between the OpenGL 3 pipeline and the pre-OpenGL 3 fixed render pipeline (i.e., no shaders aka -no_glsl). Machines with older graphics cards will already be using the second pipeline and will thus be unaffected by changes in the first.