I wish we could have hardware vendors compete on hardware with completely open software stacks from drivers on up. AMD is much farther down this path than Nvidia is. The downside of this is it gives the hardware manufacturers less flexibility in implementing new features because the APIs are design by committee.<p>On one side we have design by committee (Khronos) giving us tools like OpenCL, Vulkan, and OpenGL on the other side we have things like Cuda and DirectX.  Design by committee APIs will always have a few characteristics. The standards won&#x27;t move as fast.  The APIs will be more hardware agnostic.  And they will either be slower and less feature rich (openCL vs cuda) or lower level and more difficult to use (OpenGL&#x2F;Vulcan vs DirectX).<p>Whenever we have a clear market leader they either push their own standard or Embrace Extend and Extinguish the open standards. The leader used to be 3dFx pushing glide, and Nvidia&#x2F;ATI were the underdogs pushing standards that could run on eachothers hardware.<p>The underdogs will try to push the open standards (because they must) and the leaders will push proprietary ones (because they can) and they can move faster than the committee. There&#x27;s always going to be resistance toward spending money on research your competitor can take advantage of.<p>I think Vulcan and SpirV have the potential to put a real dent in proprietary software stacks. It can provide real benefits over any proprietary stack at the moment for heterogeneous computing. (nvidia&#x27;s blindspot is they will naturally always favor the GPU).  I hope it doesn&#x27;t end up like OpenCL did (feature poor and less performant than cuda).  We&#x27;re a long ways off from having open hardware and open drivers that can compete against closed stacks due to the performance arms race. But GOOD open standards get code written in them and they can win out over market leaders (like what happened with 3dfx).  I think Vulkan might be the starting point for this. If it gains traction and can maintain leadership in performance open stacks will have a chance at competing.<p>The biggest issue is that closed stacks can always benefit from innovations in open ones but not the reverse. Because of this, I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ll ever see competitive open drivers from market leaders. But we can have competitive open APIs that can compete across vendors, If we can at least get back to that stage I would be happy.