Metal Overview - Apple Developer (2025)

Metal is a modern, tightly integrated graphics and compute API coupled with a powerful shading language designed so you can take full advantage of Apple silicon. The low-overhead model gives you direct control over each task the GPU performs, enabling you to maximize the efficiency of your graphics and compute software, and create incredible visual experiences. Metal also enables tight integration of machine learning with scalable performance across Apple platforms, and includes an unparalleled suite of GPU profiling and debugging tools to help you improve performance and graphicsquality.

• Explore Metal documentation

The latest version of Metal is built to scale to the needs of modern apps. Metal 4 enables entirely new ways to integrate machine learning while also enabling you to encode commands and compile shaders more efficiently than ever.

• Discover Metal4

Maximize performance with MetalFX. MetalFX Upscaling, FrameInterpolation, and Denoising to save time rendering your frames so you can dramatically improve game performance.

Explore MetalFX documentation

The Game Porting Toolkit provides everything you need to get started bringing your game to Apple platforms. Discover tools that can help you evaluate your game, convert your shaders and assets, and more. You can also access the human interface guidelines and code samples to build native games that feel at home on Apple devices.

Learn more about the Game Porting Toolkit

In addition to Metal, Apple provides the tools you need to create the next generation of stunning games. And with the latest advancements in Apple silicon, you can distribute across a unified gaming platform to reach millions of players around the world.

Learn more about Apple game technologies

Combine traditional graphics with machine learning inference to take your rendering performance to the next level. Encode inference networks at the command level or integrate them directly into your shaders to compute lighting, materials, and geometry to enable highly realistic visuals for your games.

• Combine Metal4 machine learning andgraphics

Take advantage of highly optimized compute and graphics shaders through the Metal Performance Shaders framework or leverage the Metal Performance Shaders Graph framework to integrate CoreML models directly.

• Learn more about Metal PerformanceShaders
• Learn more about Metal Performance Shaders Graph

Accelerate the training of machine learning models in third-party frameworks right on your Mac with PyTorch and JAX Metal backends.

• Learn more about the Metal backend forPyTorch
• Learn more about the Metal backend forJAX

Inspect, debug, and optimize your entire rendering pipeline with Metal debugger, from mesh shading to ray tracing to machine learning. Monitor performance in real time with the Metal performance HUD. Validate your Metal app usage with the Metal API and shader validation layers. Inspect the parallel work on the CPU, GPU, and the memory usage of your Metal app with Metal system trace inInstruments.

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