If you're unfamiliar with the situation as it stands, here's a quick primer:

DirectX: Graphics API made by Microsoft. Works only on computers running Windows 10 and Xbox consoles

OpenGL: graphics API made by Khronos (an industry group for making open standards), works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, and iOS

DirectX has been favored over OpenGL for quite some time, for a variety of reasons. (Slower to adopt new technologies, GPU vendor-specific extensions, etc.) Over the years, GPU manufacturers have had to incorporate program-specific cheats and quirks into their drivers to get games to run correctly/well, which has caused drivers to become very large and messy. Then, AMD introduces Mantle, an API that works only on AMD GPUs that aimed to cut out a lot of historical baggage, reducing CPU overhead and giving greater control over GPU functions. While Mantle wasn't very successful, it led to the creation of—and formed as a base for further development of—DirectX 12 and Vulkan, carrying over the reduced CPU overhead and greater GPU control.

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