It's about redesigning the current idiotic graphics pipeline API, so the driver and the application doesn't have to use the inefficient abstractions, that are already outdated on both ends. (The GPU is much more complex and sophisticated than what it used to be. It's not just a fancy framebuffer with a few megabytes of RAM so you can do z-culling and a 3D to 2D projection. And nowadays with virtual texturing and megatextures, with the bottleneck being the latency of pushing these abstract objects to the GPU, which are getting replaced by in-driver compiled shader programs anyway, the whole thing is ripe for a bit of fundamental change.)

Take some time to watch these. I'm also not a hardware guy, but these problems are far-far from the hardware, and the solutions are very educational from a distributed systems standpoint.

http://gdcvault.com/play/1020791/

http://www.slideshare.net/tlorach/opengl-nvidia-commandlista...