Yes. Apple have their own graphics API. They were able to decide that, say, geometry shaders aren't worth the chip area or engineering effort to support. Other IHVs don't get that choice; for geometry shaders, for instance, they're part of both Vulkan and OpenGLES, there are games and benchmarks that use them, and customers (end-users, gamedevs, review/benchmark sites, SoC vendors) will evaluate GPUs based, in some small part, on how good their geometry shader support is. Same story for tessellation, transform feedback, and whatever else Apple dropped.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say Apple “dropped” these features. Tessellation is done with general purpose compute shaders. You can do the same with “geometry shaders” if the need arises as well
Other hardware vendors absolutely do the same. Geometry shaders are poor performers on several other vendors for precisely the same reason
At least some Qualcomm, Imagination and Broadcom GPUs support geometry shaders in hardware. Not entirely sure about Arm. To be fair, it could be the support isn't very good.
Some do, but a lot will have their firmware actually do the translation into other compute types that align better with the hardware.
>>(end-users, gamedevs, review/benchmark sites, SoC vendors) will evaluate GPUs based, in some small part, on how good their geometry shader support is
Do they? I can't remember ever seeing any mention of Geometry Shader performance in a GPU review I've read/watched. The one thing I've ever heard about it was about how bad they were.
Yeah, geometry shaders aren't even widely used, they weren't great in the first place and devs have moved on.
Idk, TIL, had a career in mobile for 15 years running and I didn't know this was a distinctive quality of mobile GPUs. (makes sense! but all that to say, I'm very interested to hear more, and I'll trade you an answer to that question: "maybe not! sounds like you got some smart stuff to share :)")