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The latest hints from Vulkan and D3D12 developments (VK_EXT_Shader_object[0], D3D12 Work Graphs[1]) suggest there might be an industry move away from pipelines and towards alternative solutions.

[0] https://twitter.com/slimsag/status/1644478220593659905

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37845431

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Good info, interesting. It does add a layer of complexity that takes a bit more to handle. The point of moving away from stateful/naming was to prevent global state and bugs but you can also run into those in other ways as it is somewhat like going from keyed data to offsets/positions binary data. Rebuilding pipelines also seems heavy.

Maybe the solution is a lower level API (current) and a higher level API (somewhat stateful/named but not so global). That does add extra weight though.

D3D10/11 is the sweet spot IMHO. It splits render pipeline state into a small number of immutable state group objects instead of granular render state toggles (like OpenGL or that new Vulkan extension), or an all-in-one rigid pipeline state object (like WebGPU or Vulkan).

Those D3D11 state objects are roughly: rasterizer-state, blend-state, depth-stencil-state, (vertex-)input-layout, and one shader object per shader stage.

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