This week I’ve been playing with the idea of a declarative API for scene graph construction in Swift. Kinda like RealityKit if it looked a little bit more like SwiftUI. I was spurred to try this by Christian Tietze’s call for submissions to Swift Blog Carnival. The theme this month is Tiny Languages, and it […]
Bismuth: A Prototype Scene Graph Language Read More »
I expected to have to wait 12 more years to write this post. Back in 2017, Eric Lengyel published the landmark paper, “GPU-Centered Font Rendering Directly from Glyph Outlines” in the Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques. This paper introduced the Slug algorithm, a way of efficiently rasterizing text on the GPU without first rasterizing to
Another WWDC is in the books, and with it came a major update to many platform technologies, including Metal. Metal graduated to version number 4, and in this article, we’ll explore the core features of Metal 4 as they pertain to rendering. It’s important to state up-front that this article will not cover Metal 4
Getting Started with Metal 4 Read More »
In this article, I will outline how to render high dynamic range (HDR) video with Metal. In contrast to rendering standard dynamic range (SDR) content, where we can sometimes get away without paying too much attention to color management, there are many important subtleties to rendering HDR colors accurately. A lot of the heavy lifting
Rendering HDR Video with AVFoundation and Metal Read More »
Welcome back to our ten-year retrospective on the Metal API. You can read the first part here. This post will cover the last five years of Metal’s evolution as an enabling platform technology and bring us up to the present day. 2020 – Raytracing Redux 2020 was the year of the A14 Bionic, the powerhouse
A Decade of Metal: The Modern Era (2020–Today) Read More »
Introduction In 2014, when Apple introduced the Metal graphics API, the landscape of computer graphics APIs was dominated by long-established standards like OpenGL. Seismic shifts were afoot, however, with the announcement of DirectX 12 a few months prior and the initiative that would produce Vulkan starting to take shape. These parallel efforts signaled a significant
A Decade of Metal: The Early Years (2014–2019) Read More »
Metal 3, introduced by Apple at WWDC 2022, brought with it a significant number of features that enable modern rendering techniques, faster resource loading, and flexible shader compilation. It also includes an all-new geometry pipeline that unlocks novel rendering techniques by allowing developers to bypass most of the traditional vertex processing steps and submit geometry
Mesh Shaders and Meshlet Culling in Metal 3 Read More »
In this article we will take a look at how to do tessellation on the GPU with Metal. Tessellation is a powerful technique for generating geometry dynamically with many use cases from CAD/CAM to game development and beyond. This article discusses the fundamentals of tessellation and how to do it in Metal; future articles will
Introduction to Tessellation in Metal Read More »
With the advent of iPhone 13 comes a new generation of Apple-designed system-on-a-chip: the A15 Bionic. As has become expected, Apple has published a developer-oriented tech talk to explain the new and enhanced GPU features included in this latest cutting-edge offering. You can watch it here. The tech talk is the best official source of
Understanding Metal Enhancements in the A15 Bionic GPU Read More »
In the previous article we took a first look at WebGPU and got familiar with the essential pieces of the API, the command submission model, and drawing in 2D from a static buffer. In this article, we’ll look much deeper into WebGPU. Some of our topics include: texture creation and sampling displacement mapping in WGSL
WebGPU for Metal Developers, Part Two Read More »