Playing games on the iPhone and iPad is about to get cooler as Apple announced Monday its new 3D graphics API that is slated to compete with OpenGL, currently the standard in 2D and 3D gaming.
At its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple took the wraps off Metal, its new graphics technology that aims to improve the rendering of 3D graphics by 10 times the quality of graphics rendered by OpenGL without sucking up processing power.
Metal is designed for the A7 processor and bypasses the middleware between gaming software and hardware, thus reducing overhead. Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi took the stage at the WWDC Monday to introduce Metal, which allows game developers to write their programs "closer to the metal," so to speak, and get direct access to the 3D graphics hardware. Metal will also improve the use of graphics chips in non-graphics functions, such as playing videos.
"Metal provides a single, unified programming interface and language for both graphics and data-parallel computation workloads," writes Apple in its Apple developer guide. "Metal enables you to integrate graphics and computation tasks much more efficiently without the need to use separate APIs and shader languages."
Federighi also said that Apple is working with a variety of game engines, including Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Crytek and Unity Technologies in developing Metal.
Electronic Arts, which was able to port the Frostbite 3D engine to iOS, showcased a Metal demonstration by showing footage of its online multi-player shooting game "Plants vs. Zombies." The video featured 1.3 million triangles showing up on the screen simultaneously, along with various depth-of-field effects.
Epic Games founder and chief executive Tim Sweeney also went onstage at the WWDC to provide a Zen Garden, a demonstration of Metal, showing extremely rich and detailed scenes of a koi pond with hundreds of fish that quickly react to a finger swiping the water, a cherry blossom tree with 5,000 individual petals falling to the ground, and a shimmering pond that transformed into hundreds of butterflies that were joined onscreen by thousands more.
"Metal frees up enough compute resources that we can give all the fish in that koi pond their own intelligence," said Sweeney, adding that a "huge amount" of materials become available without affecting the rest of the system.
Zen Garden will be available on the Apple App Store for free, along with the third-quarter public launch of iOS 8. Meanwhile, iOS 8 beta becomes available for developers Monday.
