I wrote a long comment on the issues Vulkan addresses a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8146533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8146533 (c

I wrote a long comment on the issues Vulkan addresses a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8146533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8146533 (can't believe 'a while back' was almost a year ago...) tldr: OpenGL is great. But, the hardware model it is based on is long outdated. The mantra for the past decade has been "Do your work in huge batches if your want peak performance". But, modern hardware is very capable of getting great perf out of lots of small batches if they are set up correctly. Unfortunately, doing that in OGL requires complicated extensions to work around the old design (AZDO). That's the big driver. But, there's also a lot of good improvements over OGL that can be made given the past 30 years of hindsight. Not the least of which is a much simpler, more consistent, more reliable, more maintainable driver model (ex: Don't ship a custom, rushed, underfunded compiler in every OS update of every Android device and just point at the spec doc when people complain that they each parse the same code slightly differently from each other.)