Apple Announces A New 3D API, OpenGL Competitor: Metal

[Alliancemd]

Re

While as a consumer only the "Continuity" thing seemed very nice, on the developer side they've left my jaw dropped to the ground.
For the developers they are offering so many things, I kind of regret that I have to make cross-platform development and not having to concentrate on Apple devices(I love to create the best experience possible)... And at last you will not have to use the crappy(strange) Objective-C.
Btw, it's interesting they called JavaScript + Modules = Swift, probably for marketing reasons...

[Maxjen]

IE, instead of, say, * in C, you could have pointer<T> foo, ptr<T> foo, and T *foo all mean the same thing.

I don't think having 3 different things mean the same thing would be a good idea. You would have to learn all of them to understand other peoples code. This nullifies the advantage that one is "more legible" for the novice.

[mmstick]

Err, rust? D?

Nope, Go. Swift looks rather similar to Go and features some of the same stuff. I doubt it has all the concurrency goodness that Go provides though. At least Go compiles on every OS and it's easy to develop with.

[rikkinho]

hm

what a joke

how much apple paid???

lol

linux, continue with opengl and bring more support to opengl es, we don't need nothing different

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Well I feel relieved now that the Official Apple Spokesperson has chimed in.

Pull your head out of your bum and do some research. Metal is iOS specific. They control the end-to-end hardware/software stack, including the CPU/GPGPU SoC and their custom ImgTec GPGPU.

They don't for OS X. Even with writing the device drivers for OS X that includes their Intel and AMD, not to mention some old Nvidia drivers, they have to contend with hardware differences: something they do not with their A7.

This is not a replacement to OpenGL.

[johnc]

Pull your head out of your bum and do some research. Metal is iOS specific. They control the end-to-end hardware/software stack, including the CPU/GPGPU SoC and their custom ImgTec GPGPU.

They don't for OS X. Even with writing the device drivers for OS X that includes their Intel and AMD, not to mention some old Nvidia drivers, they have to contend with hardware differences: something they do not with their A7.

This is not a replacement to OpenGL.

You may think so, but you'd be wrong.

[tebruno99]

Read most of the comments here but they all miss out on one fact

So this one thing that everyone seems to be missing is that Apple's Metal is not a competitor with OpenGL. As far as I've been able to tell Metal only exists for Apple's A* Processors that use OpenGL ES. What stands Metal apart from others like AMD Mantle is that Apple not only owns the GPU in these chips but also that the target of Metal is not actually cross platform support and needs to support no other device than the entire developer ecosystem of iOS (unlike OpenGL).

By getting Metal into the major engines like Crytek, Unity 3D, Unreal Engine 4, and Uni (and is already in most) its automatically supported by the engine at no additional cost to the developer within the iOS environment.

Metal is an additional feature of iOS to use instead of OpenGL ES. Theres no desktop talk here folks, mostly cause they can't develop Metal for GPUs that they do not own.

Nothing to see here except some awesome performance folks, so move along. Apple's tools and 3rd party game engines hide OpenGL ES from you just as much as Metal will be hidden from you. You'll just know it looks awesome.

[dee.]

Sure, let's go back to MS-DOS era where game developers had to ship THEIR drivers for the "most used hardware"

To be fair, that "hardware" back then was basically just soundcards...

[tebruno99]

I like how Apple Hate trumps computer knowledge in these topics on Phoronix & Slashdot. Very interesting considering what the readership is suppose to be interested in.

OpenGL != OpenGL ES

[johnc]

OpenGL != OpenGL ES

Of course not. Nobody said it is.