Metal

Accelerating graphics and much more.

Metal powers hardware-accelerated graphics on Apple platforms by providing a low-overhead API, rich shading language, tight integration between graphics and compute, and an unparalleled suite of GPU profiling and debugging tools. Metal 3 introduces powerful features that help your games and pro apps tap into the full potential of Apple silicon. Now you can render high-resolution graphics in less time, load resources faster, train machine learning networks with the GPU, and more.

A MacBook Pro with a robot video game open. Next to a gaming controller.

What’s new in Metal 3

MetalFX Upscaling

Render complex scenes in less time per frame with high-performance upscaling and anti-aliasing. Choose a combination of temporal or spatial algorithms to help boost performance.

Fast resource loading

Optimally stream asset data to Metal textures and buffers directly from storage using asynchronous I/O.

Offline shader compilation

The compiler can generate GPU binaries at project build time to eliminate in-app shader compilation, helping games improve performance and reduce load times.

Mesh shaders

This new geometry pipeline replaces vertex shaders with two new shader stages — object and mesh — that enable more flexible culling and LOD selection, and more efficient geometry shading and generation.

Metal backend for PyTorch

The new Metal backend in PyTorch version 1.12 enables high-performance, GPU-accelerated training using MPS Graph and the Metal Performance Shaders primitives.

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New Ray Tracing features

The latest advancements in Metal Ray Tracing mean less GPU time is spent building acceleration structures, work like culling can move to the GPU to reduce CPU overhead, and both intersection and shading can be optimized with direct access to primitive data.