meaningfully novel hardware approaches

This isn't really possible anymore (at least unaided by LLM). In the era of fixed function pipelines, it was possible to do something new under the hood.

The current standards of Vulkan and DirectX have exposed a lot of inner workings to extract performance which makes it hard to make a large shift. While this makes it easy to use the HW, it also makes it hard for the devs to have a single algorithm for diff HWs, ie, each new feature will need in investment by them.

For any novel functionality, devs will not like to work on features only on a small set of HW, unless they are aided by HW vendors. This creates a chicken egg situation: new features don't get prioritized up by devs which makes it hard to market the features which makes it a small market which makes it likely not to be a priority by devs.

In this era where code is cheap, perhaps we'll see more fast moving devs and HW both