CUDA being the winner (closed source, not really usable on non-nvidia GPUs) between those 2 and nvidia not wanting to open their competitive advantage to the competition for the niche of non gamings uses / scientific computing (and later AI, which became a huge win for nvidia).
vulkan came around after as this open thing (based on a previous attempt by AMD called mantle) that's trying to break down the leaky abstractions and the divide between language for graphics & video games and separate language/frameworks for gpu non-graphic computing with the promise of giving more control and more room for squeezing performance from the hardware at the cost of more complexity with the idea that you'll probably build your own abstractions on top of it for your subset of applications.
If GPU were from the get go designed as a parallelism tool first and video game tools second the hardware architecture and the language would probably be different than today and simpler (and if the competition between the duopoly didn't sabotage things)
don't forget that the drivers for GPUs would until recently get updates to patch specific video games for performance issues (not sure if they still do that ?)
[–] kuschku 2 days ago
[–] locknitpicker 3 days ago
The market demand was for video game tools, though.
People didn't wanted faster compute, they wanted their computer games to work smoothly on the hardware they already own. Therefore, they preferred to spend 100-200€ on a point upgrade, much like RAM, than scrapping their 2k€ PC.
To give people a reason to buy these upgrades, games had to use them. Therefore video cards were designed specially for the usecases and development flow that game developers already followed.
If it wasn't for the video game market, NVidia wouldn't exist as we know it today.
[–] flohofwoe 2 days ago
I bet it's all the same if not worse, and that's why GPU drivers are closing in on the gigabyte "sound barrier" (and I guess on Linux that part is played by Proton... e.g. I bet there's a ton of game-specific 'workarounds' in Proton, if not for performance, then at least to fix 3D API misuse).
Sony tried that with the PS3's Cell processor, just a wise parallel vector processor instead of dedicated hardware.
If you knew how to use it, you could get great results, which is how Naughty Dog's games became so spectacular. But if you just tried to port an existing game, things went downhill quickly, which is why GabeN talked on stage how much he hated the PS3.
Oh and this complexity led to lots of games just switching to one of the existing engines that supported it natively, and started the modern dominance of Unreal Engine. But it's also why engines introduced more parallel architectures, which a few years later became very useful when quad-core processors in PCs became mainstream.