AppleInsider Staff
At WWDC on Monday, Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi announced Metal for Mac, which combines the power of OpenCL and graphics crunching capability of OpenGL into a unified API that reduces draw rendering times by 50 percent.
First introduced as a feature in iOS 8, Metal is a core-level graphics technology that allows developers nearly untethered access to system GPU hardware for highly efficient processing. Metal for Mac works almost identically to its iOS counterpart, as developers can stack on apps on core animation and core graphics, as well as built-in OpenGL and OpenCL API support.
The addition of Metal holds obvious implications for games, apps that are traditionally graphics intensive. Epic Games demoed an upcoming zombie/survival title built on Metal, showing dynamic shaders and other impressive realtime animations.
Apple notes performance advantages can be found in any graphics-intensive app. For example, Adobe found huge improvements by stacking After Effects and Illustrator on Metal.
Metal is bundled into OS X El Capitan, which was made available to developers today.
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26 Comments
What advantage would Metal on OS X have over Vulkan?
Feeling like 1994 again in here with yet another API being thrown in.
I sure hope Blizzard jumps on this quick.
"What advantage would Metal on OS X have over Vulkan?" -- robertc It exists...where as Vulcan Drivers for OS X may not ever exist. Apple might abandon OpenGL improvements in favor of Metal - just like Microsoft abandoned OpenGL for DirectX. It's a slimy trick to keep developers on your platform.
I wonder of FCPro X and Motion X gain anything or if they will in the near future and I also would like to know how this plays with the dual GPU Mac Pro. It would be nice to see the new Mac Pro become a serious gaming machine.