“Among the surprises that Apple unveiled at WWDC 2014 is the company’s new Metal framework and shader language, aimed at radically enhancing the hardware accelerated graphics potential of the A7 Application Processor powering the company’s latest iOS devices,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.
“Metal as a technology applies to the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) of Apple’s new 64-bit A7 Application Processor used in its newest iOS devices: iPhone 5s, iPad Air and Retina iPad mini,” Dilger reports. “The new technology’s name actually derives from the fact that it provides “close to the metal” graphics performance by slimming down the overhead imposed by existing graphics libraries like OpenGL. Metal speeds up 3D rendering and general compute tasks while freeing up the CPU to handle additional work, such as more sophisticated physics modeling or audio processing in video games, for example.”
“Apple has already taken over the high end of mobile video games, with lots of exclusive titles that aren’t available on Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone (and in the future, won’t be available on Tizen). That fact that Android doesn’t get many high end games is well known enough for AnandTech to observe with rather brutal honesty that ‘the games that benefit the most from Metal are also the games least likely to be on Android,'” Dilger reports. “With Metal, Apple has targeted the overhead baggage of OpenGL for bypassing with a highly optimized new framework to allow mobile developers to coax the best possible performance from its new A7 (and of course, future A-series chips using the same types of advanced GPU technology).”
Much more in the full article here.