Metal (iOS API)

Apple used the mobile multiplayer online battle arena game Vainglory (Halcyon Fold map pictured) to demonstrate Metal's graphics capabilities at the iPhone 6's September 2014 announcement event.[1]

Metal is a low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated graphics API that debuted in iOS 8. It is intended to bring to iOS some of the performance benefits of similar APIs on other platforms, such as Khronos Group's Vulkan and Microsoft's Direct3D 12. Since November 27, 2014, Metal is available for devices using the Apple A7, Apple A8, and Apple A8X. Metal also further improves the capabilities of GPGPU programming by introducing compute shaders.

Metal uses a new shading language based on C++11; this is implemented using Clang and LLVM.[2]

Performance

Metal should have better performance than its predecessor, OpenGL, for several reasons:

Some of these points remove the amount of work the CPU is required to do to successfully execute commands on the GPU. This can lead to overall performance gain because the CPU can be then used to compute other tasks.

See also

References

  1. ↑ McWhertor, Michael (September 9, 2014). "This is the game Apple used to show off iPhone 6". Polygon. Vox Media. Archived from the original on September 9, 2014. Retrieved September 9, 2014.
  2. ↑ "Metal Shading Language Guide". September 8, 2014. Retrieved September 10, 2014.
  3. ↑ http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/07/03/metal-a-new-graphics-api-for-ios-8/

External links