Apple is bringing its Metal graphics toolkit to Mac, the company announced Monday at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Metal, announced at last year's WWDC, lets developers take advantage of tighter integration between the graphics and processing tasks performed by the iPhone and iPad's A7, A8 and A8X chips. The goal was to juice its mobile gaming offerings with speedier performance and more graphically intensive titles for iOS 8.
Mac developers can now use Metal produce better performance and flashier graphics on the Mac.
Epic Games, maker of the widely used Unreal Engine that powers high-end console and PC games, demoed Metal onstage with a new title, Fortnight, available later this year for Macs and PCs. Using Metal, Epic created graphically intensive changes to the game in real time, the company said.
The Mac has long been ignored by most game makers, which have prioritized Microsoft's Windows operating system, instead. That contrasts with Apple's iOS, which has a far smaller market share than Google's Android yet remains the more lucrative destination for many of the world's best mobile games.
With Metal, Apple is hoping to confer some of the benefits of its dominant gaming platform to the rest of its ecosystem.
"I think we're going to see pro users and all of us benefiting from Metal," said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering.
