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Comment by MaximilianEmel | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Valve might put out their own graphics API for SteamOS.

Valve seems to be substantially responsible for the mess that is Vulkan. They were one of its pioneers from what I heard when chatting with Vulkan people.

There's plenty of blame to go around, but if any one faction is responsible for the Vulkan mess it's the mobile GPU vendors and Khronos' willingness to compromise for their sake at every turn. Huge amounts of API surface was dedicated to accommodating limitations that only existed on mobile architectures, and earlier versions of Vulkan insisted on doing things the mobile way even if you knew your software was only ever going to run on desktop.

Thankfully later versions have added escape hatches which bypass much of that unnecessary bureaucracy, but it was grim for a while, and all that early API cruft is still there to confuse newcomers.

Which is very weird, considering mobile GPUs by their very nature use unified memory, so supporting things like bindless and GPU pointers (which in this case are just pointers) would be more straightforward than on PC, where basically you have 2 computers with separate memory spaces connected via PCI Express

Bindless has nothing to do with UMA and everything to do with the fundamentals of how your GPU accesses memory. Older GPUs had limited register spaces where they could store texture and buffer references, the hardware had no instructions to read textures or buffers outside of the references in those small set of hardware registers. They just weren't able to issue a request to the texture unit to read any old texture, it had to be in that set. The GPU itself wasn't able to update those registers, only the CPU could.

UMA or not doesn't matter, desktop GPUs have MMUs and are perfectly capable of reading the CPUs memory in a unified address space (even back then).

Samsung and Google also have their share, see who does most of Vulkanised talks.

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