Metal developer tools
Create, debug, and profile your Metal apps with a powerful and extensive set of tools, including the Metal debugger in Xcode and Metal system trace in Instruments.
World-class debugging
Xcode comes with a comprehensive suite of advanced tools for debugging your Metal app. With the Metal debugger, you can inspect your entire rendering pipeline and all of the resources that are used. Debug and fix visual artifacts in Metal pipelines ranging from mesh shading, to ray tracing and MetalFX Upscaling.
Scan through dependencies
The dependencies viewer provides a graphics representation of the structure of your Metal workload and allows you to view the relationships between resources and the passes which access them.
Optimize your memory usage
The Metal debugger includes a comprehensive report of your Metal memory usage to help you optimize and reduce the memory footprint of your Metal app.
Moana Island Scene, Copyright 2017-2022 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.
Inspect resources
You can inspect many resources that your Metal app uses, including objects like buffers and textures, and ray tracing acceleration structures.
Debug your shaders
The shader debugger helps you debug issues in your shader code by jumping to any point and inspecting variable values during shader execution. Edit the shader code and reload your changes to verify the fix.
Automatic runtime validation
Metal has a powerful built-in set of runtime diagnostic tools to help validate that your Metal app is running correctly. Xcode shows you where errors are — right inside your source code — which can help you catch bugs before they appear.
Verify your API usage
Metal can check whether you’re using the API correctly. For example, if you accidentally set the wrong flag on a texture, Metal will let you know.
Verify your shaders
Metal can also protect your shaders from doing anything incorrectly, such as accessing a buffer out of bounds. If there’s a problem in your shader code Xcode, shows you where — right inside your shader source code.
Take full advantage of Metal
Xcode is bundled with an advanced set of tools to help your Metal app achieve consistently smooth rendering and incredible performance on Apple hardware.
Monitor live performance
You can monitor key graphics statistics directly in your Metal app with the Metal performance HUD, making it easy to spot performance problems and find the best scope to capture in Xcode or Instruments.
Analyze the entire system
The Metal system trace template in Instruments provides a visual timeline of the parallel work on the CPU, GPU, and the memory usage of your Metal app.
Improve performance with counters
The performance timeline in Xcode displays the various passes and stages running simultaneously, along with hardware counters. You can discover over-serialization by observing non-overlapping GPU work.
Trace your shader execution
Performance heat maps in Xcode make it easy to discover expensive pixels or compute threads by visualizing a comprehensive set of performance metrics. You can then select a SIMD group to view its entire execution history, including function calls, loop iterations and active threads.
Optimize your shaders
The Metal debugger visualizes shader function cost, and shows inline statistics within your shader source, making optimizing your code a breeze. You can even edit and reload your shaders to compare performance.
Compatible with Metal Shader Converter
The comprehensive suite of Metal developer tools are fully compatible with the Metal shader converter. After preparing your project to include debug information when compiling, you can receive runtime validation errors from Metal. The Metal debugger also supports debugging and profiling your converted shaders.
Dive into Machine Learning
The Metal Performance Shader Graph viewer in Xcode helps you visualize your multidimensional compute graphs. You can even select a device to inspect how your network is executed on Apple Silicon, and discover which operations are run on the GPU or the Neural Engine.
Accelerate machine learning with Metal
Optimize your network
You can select a device to visualize the GPU operations that can be stitched together during compilation. Because these operations are fused into a single optimized Metal shader, internally, they have no memory overhead, which dramatically improves performance.
Inspect the weights
The viewer makes it easy to spot and investigate unexpected weights in your pre-trained networks – whether you’re multiplying by zero, or have a convolution layer that’s slowly duplicating it’s input.
Get started
Metal Developer Tools for macOS
Download Xcode to start using the full suite of Metal developer tools. Validate Metal API and shader usage, debug and profile your Metal app with the Metal debugger, and analyze system performance with Metal system trace in Instruments.
Metal Developer Tools for Windows
Download the collection of Windows-hosted tools, headers and libraries that enable developers to build their Metal shader programs/assets for deployment on iOS, macOS, and tvOS.