The original motivation for GetProgramBinary was to bypass the driver compiler passes, but in order to prevent the unpredictable (by the game) compilations that

The original motivation for GetProgramBinary was to bypass the driver compiler passes, but in order to prevent the unpredictable (by the game) compilations that would happen mid-game, causing CPU spikes. As far as Vulkan, this is not the same use case. Vulkan is using the DX model of compile high level to intermediate representation, and then let driver compile to maybe. One idea of SPIR-V is that any compiler can generate the bytecode, whereas on DX, it currently is that only fxc is allowed to (this didn't used to be the requirement...I speculate it changed when the IL started to drift away from HW ISA , making it so that targeting IL was a bad idea). As far as GetProgramBinary on Vulkan, that doesn't jive with how it's supposed to work. DX12/Vulkan have precompiled pipeline state objects that include compiled shader binaries as part of the state. Ideally, you build (and serialize) these at installation/startup so you don't have to worry about those during runtime.