I think the world is going into a more layered approach, where it's the job of the driver API (Vulkan etc) to expose the power of the hardware fairly directly,

I think the world is going into a more layered approach, where it's the job of the driver API (Vulkan etc) to expose the power of the hardware fairly directly, and it's the job of higher levels to express the actual rendering in terms of those lower level primitives. Raytracing is an exception because you do need hardware support to do it well. Whether there's hardware that can make 2D rendering work better is an intriguing question. The NV path rendering stuff (mentioned elsethread) was an attempt (though I think it may be more driver/API than hardware), but I believe my research direction is better, in that it will be higher quality, faster, and more flexible with respect to the imaging model on standard compute shaders than an approach using the NV path rendering primitives. Obviously I have to back that up with empirical measurements, which is not yet done :)