More garbage from the same trash factory. Get back to me when you have an API that doesn't incentivize drivers to behave differently based on the name of the video game engine.
No one has such an API, as far as I can tell. You think drivers aren't activating special code paths and replacing shader code for games that use Direct3D? I suspect we'll have a short time period where drivers don't do this for Vulkan and D3D12 before we go right back to it because in the end, whoever runs the game and runs it faster wins, no matter how broken the game is.
I think he's referring to GR_APPLICATION_INFO, which in Mantle was a struct passed during initialization containing the string names of the game and engine plus their version numbers.
The intention probably is to make app specific driver paths easier to implement but as you say, driver developers would do that regardless using the name/path/checksum of the EXE if they had to.
Seriously Khronos, take a fucking page out of C++. They went two decades with awful broken language syntax until sometime between 2004 and 2008 they got together and decided to fix it.
Today, https://isocpp.org/ is a gold mine of how to do an open standard correctly. Everything is public, future features are discussed with the community, and all the working groups are on github. That is how you take a legacy standardization body and modernize it for the open source world, not make presentations at every event for over a year going "Hey guys its gonna be great! Just wait until you see it! Ooooonnnnnneeeee day! We just know you'll love it!"