Apple introduces Metal for Mac, promises huge leap in graphics performance
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.
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.
Comments
Feeling like 1994 again in here with yet another API being thrown in.
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.
Whats Vulkan?
Seriously though if the OpenGL group can only get its act together after most of the industry says good by, It really doesn't say much good about Vulkan.
Nothing slimy at all about this. Further most developers would be writing to higher level Apple libraries (API's) anyways
Doesn't Metal require dedicated hardware? Which Macs are going to get Metal support?
I wonder of FCPro X and Motion X gain anything...
Theoretically, you could have 60+ layers with effects and view it in real time without rendering, similar to what was demoed in the keynote.
Awesome. This is the kind of thing that gets pushed through to Mac because of innovations with iOS and mobile.
Games developers would be using SDKs. That makes it easier because they handle the lower-level code:
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Metal_Rendering_API
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/07/03/metal-a-new-graphics-api-for-ios-8/
Unity says they have the largest marketshare:
https://unity3d.com/public-relations
Some bigger developers have their own engines but they have the resources to support other APIs like Metal. Frostbite (proprietary to EA) for example was shown using Metal:
http://www.frostbite.com/2014/11/frostbite-tech-demo-battlefield-4-on-ios/
This engine is used for Battlefield 3:
[VIDEO]
[VIDEO]
and it will be used for the upcoming Mass Effect 4 and Star Wars Battlefront (http://starwars.ea.com/starwars/battlefront ):
[VIDEO]
It'll be a few years before mobile devices can reach that quality but at least Metal can help them target every platform and just scale down the textures and shaders but maintaining more of the objects on-screen. The next iOS devices in September will exceed the last-gen consoles. That Star Wars game is for next-gen and out in November. It would be pretty cool to have a game like that launch on iOS but it'll be way too big in size. PC games are going past 50GB now and the Mac doesn't have the marketshare to be treated as a tier 1 platform. Mobile devices will eventually get high-end games. I could see something like Battlefield 3 and 4 coming to iOS as well as other games that made it to the last-gen consoles. The console developers will wait for the fastest hardware to be adopted. By the time the 7S arrives, there will be probably over 1 billion mobile devices somewhere between last-gen and next-gen consoles and only 1/10th of that on the major consoles.
So which GPUs will support Metal? On iOS, the A5 doesn't support it for instance, so not every mac compatible with 10.11 may support Metal.
And in that case, I wonder what happens to the performance improvements, since most seemed hinged on that.
What advantage would Metal on OS X have over Vulkan?
We don't have both in place to compare, so anything is speculative. If Vulkan actually materialized as something stable, it would probably be the popular option due to being cross-platform.
Whats Vulkan?
Seriously though if the OpenGL group can only get its act together after most of the industry says good by, It really doesn't say much good about Vulkan.
You mean Khronos? Apple is actually part of that group. They're listed as one of the contributors, but I don't know whether that is just marketing of their affiliation with Khronos or they are actually on board with it.
I would imagine Apple will need an OpenGL layer for just about forever as some programs won't give it up either because of legacy software or the desire to be platform independent. That is OpenGL though, I'm not sure vulcan has much of a future at all, it smacks of a reaction to everyone giving up and going their own way.
Nothing slimy at all about this. Further most developers would be writing to higher level Apple libraries (API's) anyways
It may have been under development before this where the reaction was the announcement itself. It appears as if a lot of the efforts came from AMD's Mantle.
This didn't demo Metal well at all.
Ever since (Mac) OS X came out in 2001 it has had OpenGL, and PC games ported across have not been able to run as fast as DirectX on the PC.
My hope if that Metal will evolve in to "Apple's DirectX," and as Mac porting houses and Game Engine vendors adopt it, we will see ported across games run at equal speed to a Windows PC with equivalent hardware. Especially since DirectX 12 is a low-level API also, so hopefully Metal and DX12 will have a very close mapping.
Ever since (Mac) OS X came out in 2001 it has had OpenGL, and PC games ported across have not been able to run as fast as DirectX on the PC.
OpenGL on OSX has also been outperformed by OpenGL on Windows in recent years. Their support for it over the past few years has been terrible, so it's not a very high bar. I kind of wonder if they borrowed from AMD and Mantle on this one. Interestingly Khronos still lists Apple as a working group participant for Vulkan (bottom of the page), which was announced under a different name just a bit before Metal, although they only started using the name Vulkan this year.