I don’t know which of my detractors to respond to, so I’ll respond here.

It should be clear that I’m only interested in compute and not a GPU expert.

GPUs, from my understanding, have lost the majority of fixed-function units as they’ve become more programmable. Furthermore, GPUs clearly have a hidden scheduler and this is not fully exposed by vendors. In other words we have no control over what is being run on a GPU at any given instant, we simply queue work for it.

Given all these contrivances, why should not the interface exposed to the user be absolutely simple. It should then be up to vendors to produce hardware (and co-designed compilers) to run our software as fast as possible.

Graphics developers need to develop a narrow-waist abstraction for wide, latency-hiding, SIMD compute. On top of this Vulkan, or OpenGL, or ML inference, or whatever can be done. The memory space should also be fully unified.

This is what needs to be worked on. If you don’t agree, that’s fine, but don’t pretend that you’re not protecting entrenched interests from the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia, Epic Games, Valve and others.

Telling people to just use Unreal engine, or Unity, or even Godot, it just like telling people to just use Python, or Typescript, or Go to get their sequential compute done.

Expose the compute!