Mac wants to be taken seriously as a gaming platform
Apple seems to be interested in making the Mac a more viable gaming platform. We're reading a bit between the lines to arrive at that conclusion, but it makes sense, considering the Cupertino company has baked its own Metal API into the next version of its desktop OS, Mac OS X El Capitan.
First launched on iOS 8 last year, Metal for Mac works much in the same way, Apple announced at its WWDC event in San Francisco today. It essentially combines the raw compute power of OpenCL with the graphics capabilities of OpenGL into a single core-level graphics API that boasts built-in support for both.
The upside for developers is they gain low-level access to the GPU with minimal overhead. In that way, it's similar to AMD's Mantle and Microsoft's DirectX 12 APIs.
Apple claims that performance gains are substantial. More specifically, Apple says Metal will provide up to 50 percent faster rendering performance. Apps will purportedly load 14 times faster and switch twice as fast, and for the CPU, Apple says Metal is 40 percent more efficient than OpenGL.
While you can play games on a Mac, it hasn't been the most popular platform -- Windows still holds the crown for computer gaming. This is where Metal comes into play.
Epic Games, the company behind Unreal Engine, showed off the possibilities of Metal via Fortnight, a new zombie-shooter that's due out for PCs and Macs later this year. The Metal API is integrated into Unreal Engine 4 and allowed Epic Games to make significant graphical changes to its title in real time.
Other developers are ready to manipulate Metal as well, including 2K Games, Blizzard, The Foundry, and more.
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1QiTCQV
