birdie NVIDIA/AMD/Intel drivers have hugely complex compilers/optimizers to run game code - there's nothing like that for the general x86-64 architecture.

birdie In fact you run your OS without any CPU driver at all - almost all the optimizations are inside the CPU.

birdie Vulkan and D3D12 were created to make GPUs truly computational devices

birdie seems like there's still an abstraction layer to run and render your game in your OS and this layer is not exactly foolproof.

Nope, both drivers and your general purpose apps are built using same hugely complex compilers and same optimizationsYou have to see your motherboard with its chipset as your platform and it does have chipset drivers including a cpu driver, you see, because driver is such an encompassing word for a piece of software even if we'd say "conventional driver" it still means nothing. Bunch of drivers for known hardware are bundled with OS and active without you actually installing them.The point is, since 6 years ago, half of the chipset is integrated into a CPU and cpu driver is a thing - it is intelppm.sys and it's bundled with chipset drivers and does very little thanks to bios flashing and microcode updates. It's being executed on a cpu core though as also is a gfx driver. Gfx driver additionally includes the code being executed on the gpu (if you use shaders from the nv control panel like fxaa and hbao)Nope, been truly computational since nvidia's G80 architecture in 2006Thin API doesn't mean it removes API layer completely, just makes it thinner and the whole thing becomesfoolproof. DX12 does have managed mode where you work similarly as with DX11.