What’s new in Metal
Explore the latest updates in Metal tools, resources, and related technologies.
Discover Metal 4
The latest version of Metal is built to scale to the needs of modern apps. The streamlined API makes it easy for you to achieve optimal performance on Apple silicon with lower overhead command encoding and scalable resource management. Compilation is more explicit and faster than ever with all new ways to reduce run-time compilation.
Metal 4 introduces first-class support for machine learning, starting with native support for tensors in both the API and shading language. Integrate machine learning directly into your Metal app using the command line to execute large networks, or within your shaders to inline inference operations alongside the rest of your shader code.
Metal 4 also extends the MTLDevice that you already use today. You can incrementally adopt features that will help your app or game the most, in the order you need them.
Metal 4 games
Deliver incredible, modern games that scale across all of Apple’s devices. Metal 4 helps you manage vast sets of resources efficiently. With new placement sparse resources you can do even more with the available system memory. Leverage familiar encoding and synchronization APIs to port your existing games directly to Metal from other platforms quickly.
Take control of shader compilation with the latest Metal compiler improvements. Use a dedicated compilation context to manage compilation quality of service. Harvest pipelines quickly to speed up adoption of ahead-of-time compilation with harvesting data sets. You can also save time spent in shader compilation and re-use shader compilation results across render pipelines with common Metal IR.
Go further with MetalFX and ray tracing
Take advantage of improved upscaling, including integrated denoising support to achieve high-quality, high-resolution renders. And achieve even higher frame rates using new frame interpolation support.
Ray tracing now supports intersection function buffers to provide more flexible indexing of intersection functions and simplify porting to Metal. You also have more control over acceleration structure builds via flags to prioritize faster intersection or smaller acceleration structure sizes.
Metal 4 machine learning
Integrate machine learning into your Metal app. Tensors are now a native resource type you can use to operate on data. Encode machine learning commands to the same Metal command buffers and synchronize that work with the same barriers as the rest of your Metal app to operate on large networks. Embed inference directly into your shaders using Metal Performance Primitives optimized for all Apple platforms.
Game Porting Toolkit 3
Evaluate even more games with an expanded instruction set, sparse resources, and experimental support for MetalFX Upscaling, Denoising, and Frame Interpolation. Build and debug your port remotely from Microsoft Visual Studio. Supercharge your HLSL shaders with access to Apple GPU features such as framebuffer fetch, function constants, and intersection function buffers using Metal shader converter, and access all Metal 4 APIs from C++ using Metal-cpp.
