MetalKit | API for GPU-accelerated 3D graphics

What is MetalKit?

The Metal framework enables workloads for data-parallel processing and GPU-accelerated sophisticated 3D graphics rendering. For fine-grained, low-level control of the organization, processing, and submission of graphics and computation commands, as well as the management of the related data and resources for these tasks, Metal offers a contemporary and streamlined API. Metal's main objective is to reduce the CPU overhead brought on by running GPU workloads.

• Metal Device: MTLDevice is a protocol that defines an interface to the GPU which draws graphics. You'll need an instance of a metal device to run other metal objects like command queues, buffers, and textures. You can make one using MTLCreateSystemDefaultDevice().
• Command Queues: It takes care of the list of tasks established for the GPU.
• Textures: is a repository for structured image data.
• Metal View:?MTKView is a subclass of UIView and is connected directly to the GPU, it may display buffers, pixel-formatted objects, and textures of graphics on the screen.

Apple unveiled Metal, its own GPU-accelerated 3D graphics API, with iOS 8.In that it's a low-level API for interfacing with 3D graphics hardware, Metal is comparable to OpenGL ES. The distinction is that Metal is not platform-agnostic. Instead, it's intended to be far more effective with Apple hardware, providing faster performance and less overhead than OpenGL ES. You will gain practical experience utilizing the Metal API in this lesson by building a basic app by sketching a triangle. By doing this, you'll discover some of Metal's most crucial classes, including those for devices, command queues, and more.

Metal vs. SpriteKit, SceneKit or Unity:

It will be useful to know how Metal stacks up against higher-level frameworks like SpriteKit, SceneKit, or Unity before you get started.

Similar to OpenGL ES in terms of low-level 3D graphics API, Metal offers superior performance due to lesser overhead. Since there is a very thin layer above the GPU, you must write all of the code necessary to perform practically any task, such rendering a sprite or a 3D object on the screen. You receive full authority and control as a trade-off.

On the other hand, lower-level 3D graphics APIs like Metal or OpenGL ES are developed on top of higher-level game frameworks like SpriteKit, SceneKit, and Unity. They offer a large portion of the boilerplate code you would typically need to write while creating a game, such as the code for generating a sprite or 3D model on the screen.

Although Xcode's iOS game template has a Metal option, you won't use it in this case. This is so that you can comprehend every step of the process as you build a Metal app nearly entirely from scratch.

Setting up Metal so that you can start rendering involves seven steps are there:

• MTLDevice
• CAMetalLayer
• Vertex Buffer
• Vertex Shader
• Fragment Shader
• Render Pipeline
• Command Queue

Example: Metal vs. OpenGL ES

Cross-platform compatibility is a feature of OpenGL ES. This means that you can create C++ OpenGL ES code and, with a few minor adjustments, run it on other platforms like Android.

Apple noted that while the OpenGL ES cross-platform compatibility was convenient, it lacked the renowned Apple integration of the operating system, hardware, and software as a whole, which is a critical component of how Apple creates its products. In order to build a graphics API exclusively for Apple hardware that would be extremely minimal overhead, performant, and handle the most recent capabilities, Apple adopted a "clean-room" design strategy.

There are still two excellent reasons to learn Metal, though:

• Test the hardware's capabilities: Metal is at such a low level that it gives you complete control over how your game functions while letting you really push the hardware to its limits.
• It's an excellent opportunity to learn: You can learn a lot about 3D graphics, creating your own game engine, and the operation of higher-level game frameworks by studying Metal.

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