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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Doing high-performance 3D rendering on the Web has always been a tricky proposition. WebGL, in its quest for programmer familiarity and cross-platform ubiquity, adopted the API of OpenGL ES. As such it has never been capable of exploiting the full power of the underlying GPU, even as desktop APIs like DirectX 12, Metal, and Vulkan …
In this short article, we’ll take a look at a relatively new compressed texture format called Basis. Basis is developed by Binomial, LLC, a company founded by Rich Geldreich (of crunch fame) and Stephanie Hurlburt. Basis is unique among compression formats in that it emphasizes efficient transcoding between compressed formats. This means that a single …
Using Basis Universal Texture Compression with Metal Read More »
With WWDC 2019 over, it’s a good time to reflect on everything that was announced and start seeing how we can put it into practice. The purpose of this article is to round up the changes to the Metal framework and tools and provide pointers to where you can learn more. This was a banner …
The purpose of this article is to describe and explore a foundational concept in Metal: vertex descriptors. Vertex descriptors are the glue between your application code (written in Objective-C or Swift) and your shader functions (written in the Metal Shading Language). They describe the shape of data consumed by your shaders. When I was writing …