At this point it’s fair to say that Apple has gone all-in on Metal.Ĭonsequently the fact that Metal is now over on OS X is not unexpected, but whether it has been planned for or not, it means that we now have 3 low-level APIs on the desktop as well as mobile.
Along with bringing Metal to OS X, Apple is going to be releasing new API kits that interface with Metal to simplify development, and internally Apple is now using Metal (when available) for parts of the desktop composition rendering chain. Yesterday we got our answer, with the announcement from Apple that Metal would be coming to OS X “10.11” El Capitan, and that it would be part of a larger investment into Metal for the company. Which is why for the last year we have been wondering if Metal would stay on iOS, or make the jump to OS X. What this means is that out of all of the vendors, it’s arguably Apple who has the lead time advantage in low-level API development. Microsoft’s DirectX 12 is arguably not there yet (Windows 10 is still in testing), and Khronos’s Vulkan was still in its primordial Mantle form at this point in 2014. Metal, despite being the 3 rd such low-level API to be introduced, was the first to reach production status. And while we typically don’t think of mobile devices as being GPU-bound, in reality Apple has been packing some relatively powerful GPUs like GXA6850 with what are relatively speaking still fairly weak CPUs, which means Apple has ended up in a situation where they can be CPU-bottlenecked on draw calls. A low-level graphics API, Metal was originally designed to bring the benefits of low-level graphics programming to Apple’s mobile operating system. At last year’s WWDC, Apple introduced their Metal API for iOS 8.
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