Apple has announced Metal for Mac, a port of the graphics processing technology already in use in iOS devices. Metal for Mac promises to vastly improve the video rendering capabilities of the newest version of the Mac OS, code named El Capitan.
At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Senior Vice President for Software Engineering Craig Federighi said that Metal, a graphics technology first implemented in iOS 8, will be part of Mac OSX 10.11. Metal is a core-level graphics technology that allows developers to completely access the system GPU for more efficient processing. Metal for Mac draws on both OpenCL and OpenGL technologies to create an API, or an application program interface that reduces draw rendering times by as much as 50 percent. "I think we're going to see pro users and all of us benefiting from Metal," said Federighi.
In terms of real-world performance, firstpost.com revealed that the implementation of Metal for Mac resulted in a 1.4X increase in app launch times, 2X improvement in app switching speeds, and up to 4X improvement in PDF opening in Preview, among others.
The advantages of Metal for Mac in terms of performance is readily apparent when using graphics-heavy apps such as games and design software like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects. At the presentation for Metal, CNET reports that Epic Games, developer of the Unreal Game Engine, showed off the capabilities of Metal via a zombie/survival game for Mac OSX titled Fortnight. Aside from Epic Games and Unreal, Apple namechecked major developers are starting to integrate support for the Metal API in their rendering engines, mentioning 2K Games, Blizzard, and Unity.
This move by Apple to fortify their gaming competence by way of improving the software handling it may be an attempt to grab a share from Microsoft Windows' domination of the sector. Mac OS has been all but ignored by game developers, preferring to code for the competition. In contrast, iOS has been a hotbed of development for different game developers, and many games have seen their debut on iOS before making the move over to Android, in spite of the fact that Android has a far larger user base than iOS.
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