Sometimes at work I daydream about this alternate reality where we let go of the idea of an universal API on top GPUs and just let vendors publish some ISA and hardware-specific libs/drivers/docs. I'm sure people would figure out nice (and less nice) abstract libraries on their own just as well.

It's so frustrating to read what the GPU is actually capable of (for example in the intel PRMs) and to know that there is absolutely no way to get the driver's compiler to do the right thing in a reliable way.

I mean imagine if icc was the only x86 compiler.

It's ok man, we can just keep piling on more turtles.

I do get the impression the new more-explicit APIs help somewhat with that, no?

All game engines that matter already support Metal, plus writing platform specific APIs is something that professional game developers are used to do since Atari 2600.