[quote=Antheus]Talking to hardware directly, especially to degree done by vendor-provided drivers is impossible, since those details are one most heavily guarded trade secrets in computing industry today. [/quote]

While I agree with the essence of your post, this part is quite wrong. 2 out of the 3 major GPU manufacturers release hardware specifications today. This includes hardware registers, instruction sets, CRTC setup, engine/memory clocking and almost everything else necessary to create a high-performance 3d driver for that hardware. In fact, open-source drivers now exist that, in some cases, surpass the official drivers in performance and capabilities.

(In case anyone is wondering, the two manufacturers who release specifications are AMD and Intel. The one that doesn't is Nvidia but its hardware has been reverse-engineered to the extent that a 3d driver is possible).

Back on topic: if you wish to construct a brand new graphics API, check the open-source graphics stack on Linux (Search for "Gallium3d" and "Mesa3d"). It is built in such a way that it is possible to layer new APIs with full hardware acceleration on top and people have been using it to accelerate OpenVG, OpenCL, OpenGL ES, OpenGL, Direct3D and video decoding APIs. This is actually very cool: not only is all the source code available for studying, its developers also tend to be very helpful.


Your only other option is to layer your API on top of D3D/OpenGL, which is going to be suboptimal up to a point.

[quote name='Zahlman' timestamp='1297246884' post='4771803']
o_O Did something happen while I was not paying attention, such that AMD and Intel are now major GPU manufacturers, but ATI isn't?

Well AMD bought ATI, and Intel sold millions of motherboards with crappy embedded graphics hardware. Welcome to the future!
[/quote]

And NVidia...what?

Even if you've somehow missed the media fallout these past few years, there's that little hint where http://www.ati.com redirects to http://www.amd.com ...