"On the application side, many developers considering or implementing Vulkan and similar APIs found them unable to efficiently support important use cases which were easily supportable in earlier APIs. This has not been simply a matter of developers being stuck in an old way of thinking or unwilling to "rein in" an unnecessarily large number of state combinations, but a reflection of the reality that the natural design patterns of the most demanding class of applications which use graphics APIs — video games — are inherently and deeply dependent on the very "dynamism" that pipelines set out to constrain."
What a surprise.
They even had to come up with ANARI to try to make data visualization companies to move away from OpenGL.
What people want is to draw their chart with lots of data fast. What people want is to visualize their architectural design. What people want is to build their game. What people want is to render their UI and draw their fonts.
None of this mentions drawing a triangle. Or using texture coordinates. Or managing buffers. etc.
The best thing that Vulkan, DirectX 12, and Metal have done is make people realize that they really don't want to be programming at those levels and that they really want to be using toolkits or engines dedicated to their problem.
Fully agree with both points, with the skill that ARB/Khronos have shown for a proper SDK experience, and that 90% of people are better off with middleware tooling.
In fact, for me Open Inventor would have been much better than raw OpenGL, naturally SGI didn't want to make what really made them money in 3D space available for free.
What a surprise.
They even had to come up with ANARI to try to make data visualization companies to move away from OpenGL.
https://www.khronos.org/anari