Metal

Gameloft updates Modern Combat and Asphalt with iOS 8 Metal-powered graphics

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated November 19, 2018

Following up on yesterday's public release of the free iOS 8 software update for Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod touch mobile devices, French games maker Gameloft on Thursday unleashed a pair of updates for its two highly-successful titles: Modern Combat 5: Blackout, a first-person shooter, and Asphalt 8: Airborne, a crazy racing game driven by a powerful physics engine which has you performing dynamic, high-speed aerial stunts.

Both games are now powered by iOS 8's new Metal framework which provides low-level access to the GPU inside the Apple-designed A7 chip (the iPhone 5s, iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display) and its A8 counterpart (the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus). When played on these devices, both of these games benefit from close-to-the-metal access to graphics cores, without the overhead of the OpenGL graphics run-time.

Epic releases Metal-powered ‘Zen Garden’ demo free on App Store

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated October 13, 2018

Demoed at WWDC back in June to show off the power of Apple's new low-level graphics framework, Metal, Epic Games' Zen Garden is now available to download on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices running iOS 8 and powered by the Apple-deigned A7 or A8 processor.

Built on the recently-unveiled Unreal Engine 4, the first game engine with built-in support for the Metal API, Zen Garden classes as a technological showcase.

The latest iPhone 6, for example, renders the demo in a whopping 1,440-by-1,080 resolution at a smooth thirty frames per second.

Read this before upgrading your iPhone 4s to iOS 8

Christian Zibreg ∙ September 17, 2014

Think twice before updating your rusty old iPhone 4s to the just-released iOS 8 because Apple's feature-packed upgrade makes its handset run most tasks about two times (or more) slower.

iOS 8 will slow down common tasks on the handset, including approximately two times slower launching of stock apps, almost three seconds longer booting and more, ArsTechnica reported Wednesday.

In addition to the performance hit, the three-year-old handset is incompatible with certain hardware-dependent iOS 8 features such as Handoff, AirDrop, the OpenGL ES 3.0 and Metal graphics run-time and more.

BioShock may finally be coming to iOS

Cody Lee ∙ July 24, 2014

We've been hearing rumors since 2008 that 2K was bringing its popular first person shooter BioShock to mobile platforms. At one point, they actually released a trailer for the game, and named IG Fun Studios as its mobile port partner.

But somewhere along the way, the concept got shelved, and was never mentioned again—until now. Yesterday, 2K tweeted the above photo followed by '#discuss,' and many believe it's a hint the BioShock mobile project is back in gear...

Epic Games builds support for iOS 8 Metal deep into Unreal Engine

Christian Zibreg ∙ July 18, 2014

Though Metal isn't among the headline user-facing features of iOS 8, its impact on games with snazzy visuals can't be overstated.

Introduced at WWDC 2014 alongside a number of other features aimed at developers, Metal is billed as a new graphics runtime that wants to replace OpenGL ES by trimming the fat to provide what Apple calls the lowest-overhead access to the A7 chip’s GPU.

And now, Epic Games - which makes the tremendously popular and powerful graphics engine that powers many premium games - has announced that the latest version of Unreal Engine (version 4.3) adds Metal support...