Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D 12, and Mantle would be grouped together in this section.

I'm kind of a fan of this, at least in theory.

I don't know how disruptive it would be to merge the OpenGL and DirectX forums (applying suitable tags to the existing posts) into a "Classic Graphics APIs" forum. Then we could create a "Modern Graphics APIs" forum (albeit with a better name than that, presumably) to handle the all the variations Spiro lists.

Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D 12, and Mantle would be grouped together in this section.

I'm kind of a fan of this, at least in theory.

I'm thinking likewise. At least in the shorter term there are still going to be a lot more people coding to classic APIs, and it makes sense for Next Generation APIs to be grouped together as many of the problems that you'll meet in one would seem to be similar in the others.

The only argument I can think of against the idea of grouping the classic APIs into a single subforum would be how disruptive it may be to existing content. That may of course be a complete non-issue if it's easy enough to just lift over all content from one subforum to another.

Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D 12, and Mantle would be grouped together in this section.

I'm kind of a fan of this, at least in theory.

More evidence needed to determine if he is actually a fan of it.

You got me :)

No, I'm very much in favour, but I'm not sure how disruptive others would consider merging those two existing forums. And I don't think we can reasonably funnel Vulkan into a next-gen forum when it goes by the name "OpenGL NG" half the time, and we have a forum called "OpenGL"...

I'm not sure how disruptive others would consider merging those two existing forums.

And I don't think we can reasonably funnel Vulkan into a next-gen forum when it goes by the name "OpenGL NG" half the time, and we have a forum called "OpenGL"...

Well - historically we've tried to avoid creating forums proactively or preemptively on the site. Instead the approach is to rescue forums that are drowning in something that maybe doesn't fit that well. At this stage, we're just not seeing a lot of traffic on Metal, D3D12, or Vulkan. Given that there's no obvious problem, just hints of a future problem, I'm content to do nothing but watch for the time being. It's possible that lumping Vulkan and OpenGL into the same forum will feel fine even though there's no common technical thread as such. The DX forum has rolled over smoothly through an awful lot of iterations and changes.

In short, I'd suggest simply posting wherever feels best (or least bad) and we'll just have to see how things evolve.

I think having a "bleeding edge" forum will always be needed, no mater what the current technology is. I would enjoy going there to read about new stuff and not have to sift through all the forums to find new and interesting stuff to read about.