We announce all changes to our operating system support, including before an operating system enters or leaves its support phase. By providing notification of these support changes, we hope it will ease the transition from version to version of the Mac operating system. Mar 10, 2020 Blizzard’s multiplayer card game Hearthstone blew up on mobile devices, but it’s also a perfect fit for the larger screen on your Mac. With simple, easy-to-learn gameplay mechanics and a fast.

Accelerating graphics and much more.

Metal provides near-direct access to the graphics processing unit (GPU), enabling you to maximize the graphics and compute potential of your apps on iOS, macOS, and tvOS. Building on an approachable, low-overhead architecture with precompiled GPU shaders, fine-grained resource control, and multithreading support, Metal further evolves support for GPU-driven command creation, simplifies working with the array of Metal-capable GPUs, and lets you tap into Pro power of Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR.

What’s New in Metal

GPU-driven Compute Encoding
Moving beyond just rendering passes, Metal in iOS 13 and tvOS 13 empowers the GPU to construct its own compute commands with Indirect Compute Encoding. Now complete scenes using advanced culling and tessellation techniques can be built and scheduled with little or no CPU interaction.

Improved Raytracing Acceleration
Metal Performance Shaders (MPS) speed raytracing operations even more by moving the bounded volume hierarchy construction to the GPU. MPS also provide new, optimized de-noising filters in an essential collection of highly-optimized compute and graphics shaders.

Metal for Pro Apps
Professional content-creation apps can take advantage of outstanding enhancements in Metal on macOS Catalina. Metal Peer Groups make it easy to rapidly share data between multiple GPUs in Mac Pro without transferring through main memory. And enhancements to CAMetalLayer give you access to the High Dynamic Range capabilities of Pro Display XDR.

Simpler GPU Families
Developing with Metal is even easier with the dramatically simplified GPU Families. Three well-considered groupings allow you to easily target functionality that's common across all Metal-enabled GPUs, access unique capabilities of Apple-designed GPUs, and better harness supported third-party GPUs on macOS.

Metal Memory Debugger
The Metal Memory Debugger gives fine-grained insight into how much memory Metal objects and rendering resources consume at runtime. It also analyzes how your resources are configured and suggests improvements, so you can deeply optimize your game or app to take full advantage of Metal.

Metal-enabled iOS Simulator
The Simulator now uses Metal to speed up the development of iOS apps that either use Metal directly or rely on Metal-based system frameworks. This is perfect for smoothly transitioning from OpenGL ES to Metal.

• Documentation

  Browse the latest documentation including API reference and articles.

• Sample Code

  Get sample code to see how Metal APIs are implemented.

• Videos

  Learn how to take advantage of the latest advancements in Metal.

• Forums

  Ask questions and discuss Metal with Apple engineers and other developers.

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Metal, Apple's optimized set of 3D tools for developers, first showed up on iOS last year in the form of a particularly beautiful Unreal Engine demo. it provided answers for serious problems that my development team faced when making cinematic games on the iPhone and iPad.

But Metal for OS X? The particle effects on stage were less impressive than last year's iOS demo, and moreover, while watching the demo onstage, I couldn't help but note that Unreal Engine games barely exist for the Mac. There's Tomb Raider, the Borderlands trilogy, X-Com, and a handful of indie titles, but many major games like Mass Effect haven't been ported.

I worried that 'Metal' had become Apple's version of 'Blast Processing,' a catch phrase in the 90s for the Sega Genesis. In commercials, Sega would gloat that only the Genesis had 'Blast processing.' The only problem was, Blast Processing didn't really do anything that mattered.

But it turns out, I was wrong.

Metal for OS X is huge — and it's going to be a much bigger deal on the Mac than it is on your iPhone or iPad. If you use a Mac to produce professional content, chances are, Metal is about to drastically speed up the professional apps you use like Adobe Illustrator and Autodesk Maya.

Why Metal matters

Let's take a step back for a moment: Metal is a set of tools that Apple's third-party developers can use for 3D rendering. It bypasses the OpenGL framework — which on OS X is notoriously slow, dragging professional Mac apps down in comparison to their Windows counterparts.

To give you an example, Giant Spacekat has a Mac at our office with both Windows and OS X installed. When we use the Unreal editor on the Windows side, importing a spaceship and assembling its materials only takes 10 seconds. On the OS X side, this same operation takes almost 50 seconds. If you're a professional user, those kinds of render delays make a huge difference in what platform you want to use.

Instead, Metal lets developers use tools that run 'at the metal,' optimizing the framework on a per-device basis. Only Apple can do this, in part because — compared to the competition — the company has a much more limited set of hardware than Android or Microsoft.

During Monday's keynote, Apple showed operations in the Unreal editor that would have slowed my Retina MacBook Pro to a crawl. Using Unreal 4 on OS X is painfully slow — so slow I've considered buying a Mac Pro to compensate for the performance lag.

But if Metal is really as fast as it seems, I'm hoping I won't have to.

It's good for the game-makers

After Adobe's spotty track record with Flash, it's easy to be suspicious at the company's ability to produce applications optimized for Apple's hardware. But when the company stopped by Apple's State of the Union presentation to show off how Metal has improved both After Effects and Illustrator, I was really impressed: After Effects rendering in particular showed a drastic improvement.

Blizzard Mac Download

Two of the most important companies making professional apps for 3D professionals have also committed to using Metal in their apps: Autodesk and The Foundry. That's huge. Any 3D professional knows that the faster your machine displays your changes, the more detailed your work can be. Autodesk Maya users, for example, might be able to look forward to leaving complex shaders active as they model and animate.

It's fantastic for Mac gamers

Metal for OS X is even better if you're an active gamer on the Mac. After all, the framework won't just be limited to the Unreal engine: All the major game engines are committed to working with Metal. This includes both Unity and companies with proprietary engines like Blizzard and 2K.

As such, not only will we see some great Unreal games on the Mac, but some of the most important game companies will be making applications for OS X.

Perhaps most exciting is the commitment to Metal from Aspyr, a company that specializes in Mac ports of Windows games like Civilization. As grateful as I am that Beyond Earth made it to Mac, it's hard to not grouse when these ports consistently run much worse than on Windows. With Metal, we may be able to look forward to equally fast games, no matter the platform.

Time to construct some Metal

Blizzard Games On Mac

The devil is obviously in the details, and we'll see how Metal holds up in the real world when El Capitan rolls out this year. But, from everything I've seen at WWDC so far, Metal is the biggest reason for creative professionals to be excited, and I can't wait to start developing for it.

WWDC 2015

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