All my work with game graphics is basically software rendering, but I have it on good authority from actual game developers that DX11 specifically is actually a

All my work with game graphics is basically software rendering, but I have it on good authority from actual game developers that DX11 specifically is actually a pretty darned good API that is a pretty good match to how current GPUs actually work. Not to mention that it has pretty good tooling for debugging. Metal is also supposedly pretty good.