Apple introduces Metal for Mac

Today at its World Wide Developer Conference Apple introduced some of the improvements it has made to its Metal development platform, including introducing Metal for Mac.

It promised a 40 per cent greater rendering efficiency.

"Metal is a core graphics technology that gives apps near-direct access to the GPU. This means faster and more efficient rendering performance across the system," said Apple.

Apple called Epic's Billy Bramer, the lead gameplay programmer on Fortnite to the stage to sing the praises of the improvements. Bramer said Epic was seeing a 70 per cent reduction in CPU use versus OpenGL and gestured to the Fortnite demo playing on the screen behind him. "64 different layers of rendering effects, and that's a lot."

Apple also revealed that 2K, Unity and Blizzard were also currently working with the platform.

Metal for Mac is part of the El Capitan update for OS X and is available today to developers in beta form.

During its conference Apple also announced iOS 9 for fall, revealed iOS 8 had an adoption rate of 83 per cent and that the App Store has now passed 100 billion app downloads.