Argument buffers are designed to make draw calls more efficient, allowing developers to render more objects onscreen at once. The biggest change performance-wise is “argument buffers”-when Apple talks about Metal 2 being 100-times faster than OpenGL and 10-times faster than the original Metal, this is the specific thing it’s talking about. Metal isn’t something regular users are going to interact with much except through the apps that use it, so I’ll stick to the highlights there are also some features that apply more directly to iOS that I covered in that review last week. But the Mac still appears to be unified, at least for now.Īpple has told me that the official, public-facing name has been updated to “Metal 2”-not because it’s the first-ever update to the Metal API but, in part, because the API now does so many new things (including GPGPU and machine learning work) that it wanted to call renewed attention to the API. On iOS, you’ll only see the full benefits of Metal 2 on newer hardware, where all of its new features are supported. It’s accurate to say that every iDevice, Apple TV box, and Mac that supports the original Metal API also supports Metal 2, since they all benefit from at least a subset of its new features. macOS_GPUFamily1_v3 is the official name for Metal 2 in High Sierra, which you can actually see in the System Information app under Graphics/Displays.
GPU Family 3 refers to the Apple A9 and A10.iOS_GPUFamily1_v4 is the under-the-hood name for “Metal 2,” since it’s the fourth Metal release to cover the A7. These families are tracked differently across the three different Metal-enabled operating systems each GPU family gets a different Metal version depending on which OS it’s using. So while “Metal 2” is being marketed as the second version of the API, it’s actually the third revision of the macOS version of the API.Īpple groups GPU hardware together into “families” based on the Metal feature set they support. From there, Apple supports different Metal features on different hardware, and there are different versions of Metal for each major operating system release. Metal 2: VR, external graphics, and a handful of bugsīefore we talk about the new stuff in Metal 2, let’s talk about how Metal versioning actually works ( PDF), since it’s not quite as simple as rolling over from “Metal version 1” to “Metal version 2.”įor starters, Apple tracks the iOS, tvOS, and macOS versions of Metal separately.
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