When innovative hardware/firmware introduces a new feature that wasn't captured in a previous hardware abstraction layer (if any such HAL exists for that class

When innovative hardware/firmware introduces a new feature that wasn't captured in a previous hardware abstraction layer (if any such HAL exists for that class of hardware), the manufacturer will somehow need to make that feature available to their customers. Depending on the scope of the feature and the investment the manufacturer wants to make, that's going to be through their driver, through some opaque handle-passing API in the HAL, or through a whole SDK. This not only lets them show off their new functionality in a way that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise, but gives them an opportunity to "lock in" customers (as NVidia did quite effectively with CUDA). Between crypto, ML, and the already-immense gaming industry, a huge amount of money has gone into "graphics" hardware over the last 10+ years and it's led to lots of novel innovations. And since those innovations weren't anticipated by existing HAL's like DirectX and OpenGL, there's a lot of these new manufacturer-specific tools as well as numerous attempts to fight "lock in" by wrangling them into new repurposable abstractions. It's just a cyclical process. It'll gradually pass as innovations in this sector plateau again, but that still looks to be some ways out.