Metal in turn is the API through which Apple will provide this access. How The Low-Level Mantle API Benefitted DICE's Frostbite Engine The situation facing developers in these cases is that at a time when GPU performance growth is rapidly outpacing CPU performance growth, the API and driver overhead has gone from problematic to intolerable, leading to developers wanting to access the hardware directly. In the case of Metal, as has been the case of all of these APIs, the idea is rooted in the fact that while high level APIs provide a number of important features from libraries to hardware abstraction, the overhead from this functionality is not worth the benefits, especially in the hands of highly seasoned programmers who have the experience and the means to go close-to-metal and bang on the hardware directly. Metal is primarily geared towards gaming on iOS, and is intended to offer better graphics performance than the existing OpenGL ES API by curtailing driver overhead and giving developers more direct control over the GPU.Īs our regular readers are no doubt well aware, Metal is the latest in a wave of low-level graphics APIs to be introduced over the last year in the GPU space, joining the ranks of AMD’s Mantle and Microsoft’s DirectX 12.
Metal is Apple’s forthcoming low-overhead/low-level graphics and compute API for iOS. In the meantime with the preliminary Metal programming guide posted over on Apple’s developer website, I wanted to spend a few minutes musing over yesterday’s announcement, how Apple ended up developing their own API, and what this may mean for users and game developers.įirst and foremost, let’s quickly recap just what exactly Apple has announced.
Later this week Apple will be holding their Metal developers sessions, at which time we’ll hopefully get some further details on the API and just how Apple intends to have developers use it. Broad strokes aside, Apple managed to pack in a number of surprises in their OS X and iOS presentations at WWDC yesterday, and there’s nothing that ended up being quite as surprising to me as the announcement of the Metal API for iOS. Though it seems like Apple’s hardware divisions can hardly keep a secret these days due to the realities of mass production, the same is fortunately not true for their software divisions.
0 kommentar(er)
