"But Marth," you say, "I don't really care about or understand any of this. What does this mean for me in a practical sense?"

Well, what it means for you is the following:

• If you're on Windows 10, you'll see developers starting to support DirectX 12 and Vulkan in their games. How much it will affect performance will vary from game to game, and also on your hardware. The greatest differences will be in games which are limited by your CPU's ability to feed data to your GPU. If you're already GPU-limited, you probably won't notice much of a difference.
• If you're on a version of Windows prior to 10, you'll have access to Vulkan, but not DirectX 12. Everything else remains the same.
• If you're on Mac OS X, I'm not certain about the current state of support for Metal API. However, support for Vulkan, whether it be directly by Apple or through a translation layer, will mean potential performance improvements.
• If you're on Linux, you'll see developers starting to support Vulkan. Expect similar results to Windows on how that will affect you, with the expectation that performance might not be on par with Windows.

For all platforms: right now, it doesn't really mean anything. Very few games support either DirectX 12 or Vulkan at the moment, and drivers for Vulkan are still in their early stages. Expect the situation to improve as more games start picking up support and drivers get time to hammer out any bugs/performance issues that might exist.

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