[MindSpunk]

Then you mustn’t have much experience working with the drivers those multi million dollar companies were (and still are) shipping to customers. They are full of bugs, quirks and performance traps. Vulkan wasn’t created because of some theoretical future problem, Vulkan was born from the real struggle of developers at the time. Problems were still struggling now.

We don’t need to speculate whether hardware vendors can ship bullet proof drivers and API implementations, they have already proven they can’t. Vulkan was built based on industry experience from organisations big enough to sit at the Khronos table. They were trying to give the vendors as little rope to hang themselves on by reducing the complexity of driver implementation because these stakeholders (large AAA studios) were collectively expending massive resources working around vendors inability to ship good quality drivers. This problem is still ongoing even with Vulkan.

Vulkan drivers on Android are a complete joke. They barely work and I’m debugging and working around a new driver bug or performance trap every few weeks at this rate. If we can’t rely on quality Vulkan drivers, an API designed to make drivers easier to implement, how will vendors fare with a much more complex to implement API like OpenGL? (poorly, look up the history of OpenGLES3).

Desktop PC is the exception because it’s the only GPU market where hardware vendors have real market pressure to deliver working drivers. Just look at Intel’s Arc launch, a product where it’s single biggest criticism and flaw citied universally is driver issues. There is no other market where this same pressure has been applied. Nobody bought a phone specifically because it had “good GPU drivers”. Unless the hardware market a vendor is selling to cares garbage drivers are the default. Qualcomm and Arm provide more than enough proof for that.