[kelvin0]

Gets much worse than that, for anyone having shipped AAA games on multiple consoles: 1) Ubershader program files (#ifdef's pepper generously everywhere) 2) Each console has it's own quirks and gotchas that you try to abstract 3) CPU/GPU interface is a nightmare and debugging is as painful as it gets.

[fsloth]

"CPU/GPU interface is a nightmare and debugging is as painful as it gets."

I suppose this is one of the biggest main paint points. Not a verbose API, but the fact that the drivers are so complex that they often break the expectation that you can trust the underlying implementation if it's provided by a vendor.

No linguistic overlay is going to fix the underlying drivers provided by graphics card providers.

Before figuring out how to make the interface elegant I claim it should first become robust. If it's not robust then wrapping it in an elegant interface will only make things worse.

[tehrei]

Vulkan and DirectX 12 are attempting to mitigate the driver problem by removing as much of the driver as possible.

I've always sort of suspected AMD's Mantle initiative, which grew into the above two technologies, was at least partly motivated by their inability to ship a driver with the same performance as nVidia's...

[yoklov]

Sadly, it looks very much like both Vulkan and DX12 are going the way of their predecessors. By which I mean tons of extensions, and nobody really thinks that they'll be able to avoid working around buggy games the same way previous drivers had to, do they?

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but these seem like issues inherent in the situation, and not something caused by particular quirks in gl/dx.

[Guvante]

> nobody really thinks that they'll be able to avoid working around buggy games the same way previous drivers had to, do they?

It depends, the running understanding was that when told to do X the driver actually did Y so the game did Z which the driver transformed to X. Unfortunately a latter update caused Z to become W so a game specific fix was added to make it "correctly" do X.

If Vulkan/DX12 can avoid the shell games then the whack-a-mole could in theory be eliminated.

> Maybe I'm being too cynical, but these seem like issues inherent in the situation, and not something caused by particular quirks in gl/dx.

It actually might be given the huge amount of underlying work the drivers were doing to maintain the fasade they were presenting. By removing much of the fasade it could help.