[benched]

I am a graphics engine programmer. This is not an absolute. Rather, a graphics API is an abstraction of a generic GPU, so it is never as low-level as it could be. The more the API provides ways to expose the underlying hardware more directly, the more the API can be said to enable "low-level" programming. It's relative. You can hear Carmack talk about this issue in some of his QuakeCon keynotes.

[bitwize]

There are tradeoffs with that, too. The moment you provide low-level access, you make whatever low-level interface is supplied a standard to be supported now and forever. See: the VGA, or any of the Amiga chipsets. One thing that may fall out of this is that future GPU vendors would provide the low-level interface as an abstraction over what's really happening under the hood. And then developers will complain that they can't take advantage of the the real chip's theoretical capabilities.

[z3phyr]

Generally, I ask this to graphics programmers (Don't take any harm). What will you do after graphics singularity is reached? People say video game graphics are going to be photorealastic in 10 years.

[whatshisface]

Movie CGI is already photorealistic. Minecraft is not. You can add an arbitrary (and exponentially growing) computational cost to your game by making the world more dynamic. The games we look at today as paragons of cg advancent are really just static meshes with a few small entities running around. Any step away from pre-baked, pre-compiled and pre-made content will easily consume as many years of tech advancement as you let it. (For evidence, look at how long a modern level editor takes to bake in something as relatively simple as lighting.)

[benched]

Right now, there is no shortage of things to work on, and things that have not been done yet. I am not currently aware of any horizon past which that won't be true. I don't see any problem yet, and at any rate, there are tons of other kinds of programming to do.