Apple announced at Worldwide Developers Conference at San Francisco last Monday that they are bringing the Metal Graphics toolkit to Mac OS, which will bring Apple devices' graphics to the maximum level.
According to James Martin of CNET, Mac developers can now maximize the use of Metal Toolkit to optimize and enhance its graphics for better gaming, image and video viewing.
In the event, they showcased the capabilities of the feature through the new game 'Fortnite', which will be released this year and supported on both the Mac and PC.
Also referred to as 'Metal,' this revolutionizes game developing as most companies get to create games intended only for the Windows PC. Now, with the graphics enhancer, Apple is hoping that more producers will switch to Mac as a platform and will regard devices with the Mac OS as one of the best gaming devices.
Metal is a low-overhead hardware accelerated graphics API that was first introduced in the iOS 8. The hardware can showcase graphics similar to known API platforms like Microsoft's Direct3D 12 and Khronos Group's Vulkan.
It will be available for Apple's A7, A8, A8X, and OS X EI Capitan. As of June 8, the API is available for the public.
Another advantage of the Metal API is that it enhances the capabilities of GPGPU programming by introducing computer shaders.
Performance of the new Metal API is also better than the performance of OpenGL, the Metal API's predecessor. This is because the latter has better precomputed shaders and direct state validation. It also has open coordination between GPU and CPU and has improved shared memory space.
The company is expecting more costumers for their products as they continue introducing new and exciting features like the Metal Graphics Toolkit. According the Senior Vice President of Apple's software engineering Craig Federighi, "I think we're going to see pro users and all of us benefiting from Metal."
