That's part of it, but there's other reasons too. Promit[1] had a nice post that described four goals of the new generation of APIs: improving validation, reduc

That's part of it, but there's other reasons too. Promit[1] had a nice post that described four goals of the new generation of APIs: improving validation, reducing the complexity of the driver, allowing useful multi-threading, and giving developers more control over how the available hardware is used (e.g. multi-GPU). It's not an exhaustive list, but he filled in some of the backstory quite well. [1] https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/5215019/ https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/666419-what-are-your-op...