Hey, dragon, thanks so much for your thoughtful replies. This thread turned into a bonanza of revelations into the future of graphics apis. And I have to concur

Hey, dragon, thanks so much for your thoughtful replies. This thread turned into a bonanza of revelations into the future of graphics apis. And I have to concur, cpus are getting so inexpensive and powerful, proprietary renderers (designed to run on farms as well) simply target vector extensions for parallelism. Regarding learning GPU Architectures and Programming, usually in the Graphics Gems books there is an introductory section devoted to compute. But you are on own regarding streaming, tracing, tuning, multi gpu. All still very much dark arts ;)