The black box criticism is fair but to be expected. Early 3D APIs were black boxes, but that had the advantage of allowing IHVs to experiment with different imp

The black box criticism is fair but to be expected. Early 3D APIs were black boxes, but that had the advantage of allowing IHVs to experiment with different implementations behind the scenes. Now that things have largely settled down, moving to explicit APIs like Vulkan makes sense. With hardware acceleration for ray tracing we're only just at the beginning of the development, so having fairly black box APIs makes sense again. Expect that to change eventually once the industry has settled on answers to many of the currently open questions, but it might take a while.