My preferred metaphor is to the RISC revolution. Just like RISC decoupled CPU design from programming language design (in the sense that hardware was often desi

My preferred metaphor is to the RISC revolution. Just like RISC decoupled CPU design from programming language design (in the sense that hardware was often designed to make assembly coding easy), Vulkan has decoupled shader language design from driver writing. OpenGL was designed under the assumption that the general game-dev public would be writing shaders for direct consumption by the driver/hardware combo; Vulkan, on the other hand, seems to be designed to be a) written by a narrow group of game engine developers, and b) generated by compilers from higher-level shader languages. (NB: I Am Not An Expert and these are my Uneducated Impressions.)