About Metal and This Guide

The Metal framework supports GPU-accelerated advanced 3D graphics rendering and data-parallel computation workloads. Metal provides a modern and streamlined API for fine-grained, low-level control of the organization, processing, and submission of graphics and computation commands, as well as the management of the associated data and resources for these commands. A primary goal of Metal is to minimize the CPU overhead incurred by executing GPU workloads.

At a Glance

This document describes the fundamental concepts of Metal: the command submission model, the memory management model, and the use of independently compiled code for graphics shader and data-parallel computation functions. The document then details how to use the Metal API to write an app.

You can find more details in the following chapters:

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with the Objective-C language and experienced in programming with OpenGL, OpenCL, or similar APIs.

See Also

The Metal Framework Reference is a collection of documents that describes the interfaces in the Metal framework.

The Metal Shading Language Specification is a document that specifies the Metal shading language, which is used to write a graphics shader or a compute function that is used by a Metal app.

In addition, several sample code projects using Metal are available in the Apple Developer Library.