iOS 8 New Metal Feature May Greatly Boost Game Perfomance

[brujo55]

Arguably the most relevant thing to our interests that was announced during the WWDC keynote this morning was iOS 8's new Metal feature. Assuming you're playing a game that has been optimized for Metal, that particular game should perform way better. Backing things up a bit, the disadvantage iOS hardware has always had over dedicated gaming consoles is a total lack of direct access to the hardware. Everything you do on iOS has to go through OpenGL, which in the simplest way I can describe it basically serves as a middleman between the game you're trying to run and your iOS device's processor that's doing the heavy lifting. Comparatively, something like the PS Vita is far closer to having its software interface directly with its hardware which is among the many reasons why dedicated consoles can squeeze out such great graphics with (in some cases) so little horsepower.



Again, this is a gross over-simplification, but if you imagine things before Metal as there being a translator in between the game you're playing and the hardware rendering it, with Metal that translator is reduced to the point of being almost a non-issue. As such, Apple is boasting a 10x boost in rendering performance for Metal-optimized games. During the keynote, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare was running inside the Frostbite engine used on consoles and Epic appeared on stage to demo an amped up Epic Citadel [Free]-like Zen Garden which provided some insane visual effects.

Talking to developers outside of the keynote, many mentioned that the optimizations Apple is making could have a very significant impact on game performance. Like everything, it comes with a catch- Taking advantage of Metal is going to require developers spending potentially significant amounts of time optimizing their game specifically for the iOS platform. These days, many developers work in multi-platform development environments like Unity, hoping to cast as wide of a net as possible by releasing their games on iOS, Android, PC, and any other platform they can.

According to developers I've talked to, the most realistic thing for gamers to expect is for existing Unity games to get a little better once Unity supports Metal. Unity games often come with their own overheard compared to developing natively specifically for iOS, so most developers think that when Unity supports Metal, the Unity overhead and the Metal performance boost will likely cancel each other out- Resulting in Unity games that play better than Unity games typically do across the board.

I'm sure there will be benchmark titles exclusive to iOS that take advantage of Metal in crazy ways that produce some jaw-dropping graphics... But, it seems a more realistic expectation is that existing Unity games, once updated follow the launch of iOS 8 will probably run a little better than they do now.

Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare May Be Coming to iOS 8 (Exclusive)(ps4 graphics)





Today, as part of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), Craig Federighi showed Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare running on an iPad with iOS 8, its upcoming mobile operating system. Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering said that EA used its Frostbite console engine to run that demo, and that there were 1.3 million triangles on the screen at a time on Plants vs Zombies.

No further details were given on the game itself, although Federighi mention they are working with AAA developers such as EA, Crytek and and Epic Games.

Are you looking forward to console-level graphics on your mobile devices?

[Archimedes]

Man I gotta say I'm impressed. But there are sooo many inconveniences attached to this that I don't know how useful this feature will end up being.

[Henrik]

I hope we'll one day see something like this on Android. OpenGL ES is really not well suited for current mobile hardware or for emulation at all, something purpose-designed like this would help speed quite a bit.

[Bread And Butter]

I hope ios 8 will be good os than ios 7 my ipad running slow on ios 7.0.4

[Terminator]

Imagine Metal imememted in the iOS version of PPSSSPP