Digital Foundry has a sponsored video interview for The Surge 2 that goes into extensive detail about modern graphics programming, and it rules
getting some perspective on the practical benefits of vulkan is neat because it helps me understand that issue I had the other day: why are only d3d12/vulkan games reaching 4k60
elaborating on this: if you're only able to draw 8 unique decals at a time, you're locking the entire G-buffer to do this draw, which means the next 8 have to wait on the previous 8, creating a serial bottleneck. instanced draw + all textures available in the pipeline = the GPU can draw all of these decal meshes on all the attachments at the same time potentially in parallel. since a single draw is exponentially more expensive at higher resolutions, the parallelization helps A LOT
vulkan and family didn't add anything new in terms of pipeline capabilities (nvidia task and mesh shader stages notwithstanding), but they do enable these sorts of massive scale pipelines which games are going to need to hit 4k
I would be surprised if Sony continued to support the GNMX API for the PS5. Seems like raw GNM/Vulkanish is really the path forward.
it turns out, bindless textures and unlimited descriptor sets is extremely helpful for instanced drawing, which is of course heavily used by modern games for environment detail; it means The Surge 2 can draw all of its surface decals onto the G-Buffer simultaneously in a single instanced draw call, avoiding ALL of the penalty of rebinding textures between sets of 8 unique decals