Metal
As has long been the story at One Infinite Loop, what Apple giveth is what Apple taketh, and Apple’s latest rendition of OSes is going to be no exception. Listed in the developer release notes for both iOS and macOS, Apple is deprecating support for what are now their legacy graphics and compute APIs: OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenCL. Instead, Apple is strongly encouraging developers to use their proprietary Metal API, which has been available for a few years now. Apple’s lack of interest in Khronos’s Open APIs has not gone unnoticed over the years. Apple never added support for OpenGL ES 3.1 or later on iOS, and similarly macOS doesn’t go beyond OpenGL 4.1 (Khronos is up to 4.6 now). Instead, Apple has been...
Bringing Vulkan to Apple's Platforms: Khronos Group Announces Open Source MoltenVK 1.0 & SDKs
One of the unfortunate outcomes of Apple's desire to build their own top-to-bottom software ecosystems is that the company has gradually pulled away from supporting common APIs, particularly in...
21 by Nate Oh on 2/26/2018Comparing OpenGL ES To Metal On iOS Devices With GFXBench Metal
In the past couple of years we've seen the creation of a number of new low level graphics APIs. Arguably the first major initiative was AMD's Mantle API, which...
34 by Brandon Chester on 6/15/2015Apple’s Metal API Comes to OS X Desktops
At last year’s WWDC, Apple introduced their Metal API for iOS 8. A low-level graphics API, Metal was originally designed to bring the benefits of low-level graphics programming to...
63 by Ryan Smith on 6/10/2015