[jra101]

It is higher level than Vulkan as you don't need to allocate or manage GPU memory, the implementation handles that for you. You also don't need to worry about transitioning render surfaces between different states (D3D12 and Vulkan).

It does allow you to create pipeline state objects ahead of time like Vulkan and D3D12 but they only include a subset of state (shader + antialiasing state + color/depth attachment state). The rest of the state is set when recording the command buffer.