[kimixa]

It's all still available, arguably more accessible from a cost and documentation point of view - I'd argue that the bar to getting something is so much higher.

You can today start banging registers on GPUs, or write your own shader programs, there's well documented modern hardware (e.g. [0]) and completely open-source drivers just sitting there for reference. The issue is that there's so moving parts now that to get anything visible to actually happen it's not just wiring up a couple of registers, but thousands just to get it into a state you can even see the registers you want, then a thousand more.

[0] https://gpuopen.com/amd-gpu-architecture-programming-documen...