Metal (API)

Metal
Initial release June 2014 (2014-06)
Written in C++11
Operating system iOS, macOS, tvOS
Type 3D graphics API
Website developer.apple.com/metal/
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 and compute application programming interface (API) that debuted in iOS 8. It combines functionality similar to OpenGL and OpenCL under one API. It is intended to bring to iOS, macOS, and tvOS some of the performance benefits of similar APIs on other platforms, such as Khronos Group's cross-platform Vulkan (which debuted in mid-February 2016) and Microsoft's Direct3D 12 for Windows.

History

Metal has been available since June 2, 2014[2] on iOS devices using the Apple A7 or later, and since June 8, 2015[3] on Macs (2012 models or later) running OS X El Capitan.

Design

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.[4]

Support for Metal on OS X was announced at WWDC 2015.

Performance

Metal should have better performance than 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 then be 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 10, 2014. Retrieved September 9, 2014.
  2. "Apple gets heavy with gaming, announces Metal development platform". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2017-06-16.
  3. "Apple Announces OS X El Capitan with Refined Experience & Improved Performance". Apple Newsroom. Retrieved 2017-06-16.
  4. "Metal Shading Language Guide". September 8, 2014. Retrieved September 10, 2014.
  5. "Metal, a new graphics API for iOS 8 – Unity Blog". Unity Technologies Blog. Retrieved 2017-06-16.
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