Bear in mind that there was a great deal of fragmentation within OpenGL as well, due to tons of proprietary OpenGL extensions to support new features of video cards anyway.
Just because we had "OpenGL" and "DirectX" doesn't mean that there was only one thing to consider when doing engine development.
Strongly agree with this. That is a big part of the reason I don't think a unified API on all platforms helps the situation much. Hardware across different vendors and device categories (mobile vs console vs PC) varies wildly. I've never worked on a game that targeted console where "PC directx" and "Xbox directx" weren't different targets and usually AMD and Nvidia had slightly different code paths in some places for extensions or profiling reasons. Add to the fact that just having a portable graphics API doesn't magically make your game portable to all platforms, and that most games are made with portable engines that already run in some from on all major consumer hardware it just seems like there is less of a practical reason for Vulkan every where.
Still, slightly different code paths is better than totally different API, no?
The web doesn’t automatically give you cross browser pages. You have to fix compatibility bugs and sometimes do things two ways. But it’s way easier than having separate WinForms,
Cocoa, and QT UIs.
Just because we had "OpenGL" and "DirectX" doesn't mean that there was only one thing to consider when doing engine development.