Apple has announced a new iOS game development platform at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco.
The Metal platform is a low-level rendering applications programming interface designed for Apple’s A7 processor, which includes built-in 3D graphics. The technology will allow developers to directly access the 3D graphics hardware in iOS devices, improving rendering performance for 3D graphics up to tenfold, according to Apple.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney noted that Metal replaces the aging OpenGL ES development platform. “It’s literally an order of magnitude improvement,” said Sweeney. “There’s a huge amount of overhead that OpenGL adds to the graphics pipeline.”
Metal will also improve non-graphics use of graphics chips, such as video, to speed-up application performance, according to Apple.
