The game I'm working on uses compute shaders for pretty much all the gameplay.
These APIs are just to control the GPU, they are just complicated to give developers flexibility. Just because you can't think of uses for these features for gameplay doesn't mean they don't exist.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding "The fragmentation is a sign of desperation" but Metal, Vulkan and DX12 have very clear reasons they exist:
-Metal was created by Apple to unlock features that their GPUs had that OpenGL ES 3.0 does not support. This is pre Vulkan so that wasn't an option.
-Vulkan addresses the desire by developers to make more low level use of GPUs. AMD Mantle started the trend but it became clear that either a standard needed to be developed or every platform/gpu maker would have their own API.
-DX12 was created as the successor to DX11 to address the same issues as Vulkan but in the way that the Microsoft team wanted to.
Compute shaders are trying to fit an elephant on a scooter. The reason Unity has poor animation performance with Mechanim is that they use compute shaders for skin mesh animation so they can apply shaders across assets but that forces them to send all model data every frame, sealing the fate of that engine to the scrap heap.
I think the path forward will be massively parallel microcontrollers with some new memory management replacing the MMU in CPUs allowing for the CPU and GPU to merge. Look at the RP2040 microcontroller for how that is progressing, it will take decades if it ever happens.
GPUs will never do general purpose computing as well as CPUs, they don't handle branching the way you need so the only way to solve this problem is to make the GPU more like a CPU but then manage to scale the memory access.
The VAO was the last meaningful feature added to OpenGL, companies are desperate to always develop new things because that is how our economy works now, but eventually our stored energy is going to deplete and we will have to settle on things long term.
I mean with the newest API you are throwing alot of still very performant hardware on the junk pile... I'm targeting Raspberry 4 for my lowest performance device at 5W single CPU core and GPU maxxed out...
These APIs are just to control the GPU, they are just complicated to give developers flexibility. Just because you can't think of uses for these features for gameplay doesn't mean they don't exist.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding "The fragmentation is a sign of desperation" but Metal, Vulkan and DX12 have very clear reasons they exist:
-Metal was created by Apple to unlock features that their GPUs had that OpenGL ES 3.0 does not support. This is pre Vulkan so that wasn't an option.
-Vulkan addresses the desire by developers to make more low level use of GPUs. AMD Mantle started the trend but it became clear that either a standard needed to be developed or every platform/gpu maker would have their own API.
-DX12 was created as the successor to DX11 to address the same issues as Vulkan but in the way that the Microsoft team wanted to.