14 DAY TRIAL // The European Patent & Trademark Office has published a new trademark filing signed Apple Inc. The filing is for the icon that Apple chose to designate “Metal,” the exciting new graphics technology that brings mobile games on par with console titles.
The documentation put forth by the European Patent and Trademark Office indicates that the Metal trademark was filed under four separate International Classes, all of which obtained and published by Patently Apple.
Metal is said to provide the lowest-overhead access to the GPU (graphical processing unit), which allows a developer to maximize the compute potential, and ultimately the graphics of an app or game. Its streamlined API (application programming interface) is supported only by iOS 8 and only by a few select devices in the iPhone and iPad range. It does precompiled shaders, efficient multi-threading, and more.
Apple puts it into plain English for regular customers as follows:
“Built for developers who create highly immersive console games, Metal is a new technology that allows them to squeeze maximum performance from the A7 and A8 chips. It’s optimized to allow the CPU and GPU to work together to achieve optimal performance. It’s designed for multithreading, and there are great tools for putting it all together in Xcode.”
Over at developer.apple.com/metal, Apple offers the Metal Programming Guide (which allows devs to go through the fundamental concepts and see how to set hardware state and manage objects), the Metal Shading Language Guide (compute shading language), the Metal Framework Reference, and a slew of video presentations and tutorials, including an overview, the fundamentals, and advanced use of Metal.
