[pandaman]

It's not about supporting weird hardware but about removing the unnecessary abstraction. E.g. in Vulkan you cannot directly write non-uniform inputs for the shaders because different GPUs may need that data in different formats and layouts. There is absolutely no reason to do this on a console, which only has one GPU and the layout of its data is very well known so you can just save a whole bunch of unnecessary code and gain an ability to use GPU compute to set up your draws on top of that.

[shmerl]

And how much of a benefit it gives vs requiring to make a completely different set of shaders which you can't even reuse? That's a strong claim that you can't have good performance, after SPIR-V is translated by the compiler.

[pandaman]

I am not sure what are you talking about here (how is setting up inputs for a shader related to SPIR-V, which is IR format for shader code?) but, as I said and you denied, this how you get a game running on a $200-$300 console look the same as a game running on a $1000-$2000 PC.