This is already how we do it on most consoles. The CPU has to sync with the GPU to know when the resources associated with draw commands are safe to release.

This is already how we do it on most consoles. The CPU has to sync with the GPU to know when the resources associated with draw commands are safe to release. Having something like glTexImage2D is way too high level for these graphics APIs and would be a luxury. Instead we get a plain memory buffer and convert manually to the internal pixel format. There is no waiting to free resources however, unless either the CPU or GPU is starving for work. We have a triple-buffering setup and on consoles you also get to create your own front/back/middle surfaces as well as implement your own buffer swap routine. This provides a sync point where we can mark the resources as safe to release. It's definitely more complexity on the engine part, but as mentioned in the forum post it makes everything much, much easier when you get to debug and tune things. Also having to implement (or maintain) all of that engine infrastructure gives us a better perspective into how the hardware works and how to optimize for it. However, even with Vulkan or DirectX12 I doubt NVidia or AMD will expose their hardware internals publicly which is critical in optimizing shader code. On consoles we get profilers able to show metrics from all of the GPU's internal pipeline. It makes it easy to spot why your shader is running slow without having to send your source code to the driver vendor.