If your Mac isn't Metal-compatible, that doesn't mean it can't run OS X El Capitan. Apple said all Macs that support OS X Yosemite can upgrade to El Capitan. Here's which Macs will be OS X El. Metal was introduced in OS X El Capitan, so as long as you’ve updated your Mac’s software in the past couple of years, you should be good. Generally speaking, any MacBook released in 2015 or later.

• Mac Metal Update Software
• Mac Metal Update Settings
• Mac Metal Wisconsin

• Modern Rendering with Metal

  Render a complex scene with the latest rendering techniques and effects. This sample uses advanced Metal features, such as indirect command buffers, sparse textures, and variable rate rasterization, to implement rendering algorithms that use GPU based mesh culling, tile based deferred lighting, ambient occlusion, volumetric fog, and cascaded shadow maps.

  macOS iOS

  View sample code

• Animating and Denoising a Raytraced Scene

  Render and denoise a dynamic scenes in your ray tracer with Metal Performance Shaders.

  macOS iOS

  View sample code

• Creating a Custom Metal View

  Create a custom Metal view by interacting directly with CoreAnimation to obtain drawable textures. Control rendering on the main thread or secondary thread. Execute rendering in a loop in-sync with the display or render only in response to a system event.

  macOS iOS tvOS

  View sample code

• Calculating Primitive Visibility Using Depth Testing

  Understand how to use depth testing, a fundamental operation for rendering 3D scenes. This sample draws geometry with varying depth values allowing Metal to remove pixels in triangles obscured by other triangles.

  macOS iOS

  View sample code

• Customizing Render Pass Setup

  Create a custom render command encoder using a render pass descriptor. This sample renders to an offscreen texture by setting up its own render pass descriptor rather than depending on one provided by a MTKView.

  macOS iOStVOS

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• Performing Calculations on a GPU

  Use Metal to issue data parallel calculations to the GPU. This sample shows how to obtain a Metal device, create simple buffer resources, and execute a basic compute kernel.

  macOS

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• Using Metal to Draw a View’s Contents

  See how to use Metal for setup and rendering. This sample shows how to configure a MetalKit view, setup Metal for rendering, and display rendered content.

  macOS iOS tvOS

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• Using a Render Pipeline to Render Primitives

  Render simple geometry in Metal. This sample shows how to work with vertex data and SIMD types, configure a graphics rendering pipeline, write GPU functions, and issue draw calls.

  macOS iOS tvOS

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• Creating and Sampling Textures

  Use simple texturing with Metal. This sample shows how to configure texture properties, interpret texture coordinates, and access a texture in a fragment function to display a 2D image.

  macOS iOS tvOS

  View sample code

• Calculating Primitive Visibility Using Depth Testing

  Understand how to use depth testing, a fundamental operation for rendering 3D scenes. This sample draws geometry with varying depth values allowing Metal to remove pixels in triangles obscured by other triangles.

  macOS iOS

  View sample code

• Synchronizing CPU and GPU Work

  Efficiently update and render animated resources while sharing them between the CPU and the GPU. This sample shows how to modify data each frame, avoid data access issues, and execute CPU and GPU work in parallel.

  macOS iOS tvOS

  View sample code

• Customizing Render Pass Setup

  Create a custom render command encoder using a render pass descriptor. This sample renders to an offscreen texture by setting up its own render pass descriptor rather than depending on one provided by a MTKView.

  macOS iOStVOS

  View sample code

• Basic Argument Buffers

  Use a simple argument buffer to store references to Metal resources. This sample shows how to encode textures, buffers, samplers and constant values into a Metal buffer and access these in a shader for rendering.

  macOS iOS tvOS

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• Argument Buffers with Arrays and Resource Heaps

  Reduce CPU overhead and improve performance by using a heap to store resources set in an argument buffer. This sample shows how to define an argument buffer structure that contains arrays and how to allocate and use resources from a heap.

  macOS iOS tvOS

  View sample code

• Argument Buffers with GPU Encoding

  Use the GPU to encode a rendering pass for even better performance using an argument buffer. This sample shows how to write data into the argument buffer from a compute kernel and accessing it in a subsequent render pass.

  macOS

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• Encoding Indirect Command Buffers on the CPU

  Create an indirect command buffer and encode commands using the CPU. This sample shows how to efficiently render many varying objects repeatedly using an indirect command buffer.

  macOS iOS

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• Encoding Indirect Command Buffers on the GPU

  Dynamically encode rendering commands using the GPU. This sample uses a simple culling algorithm to select objects in a compute kernel and increase rendering efficiency by drawing only those that are visible.

  macOS iOS

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• Basic Tesselation

  Tessellate a triangle or quad patch with adjustable per-patch tessellation factors. This sample allows the user to control the number of triangles that make up a patch and visualize the geometry produced.

  macOS

  View sample code

• Creating a Custom Metal View

  Create a custom Metal view by interacting directly with CoreAnimation to obtain drawable textures. Control rendering on the main thread or secondary thread. Execute rendering in a loop in-sync with the display or render only in response to a system event.

  macOS iOS tvOS

  View sample code

• Device Selection and Fallback for Graphics Rendering

  Choose the best GPU for rendering or display and respond to the addition and removal of an eGPU or external display. This sample sets up rendering on multiple GPUs and enables seamless switching between them.

  macOS

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• Device Selection and Fallback for Compute Processing

  Utilize the additional computational power of a second GPU and transfer data it produces to your application. This sample executes a computation intensive N-body simulation on one GPU while continually transferring data to the primary GPU for rendering.

  macOS

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• Migrating OpenGL Code to Metal

  See how to replace your app’s OpenGL code with Metal. This sample shows how shaders, renderable textures, and buffers work with Metal by comparing them with common OpenGL and OpenGL ES rendering constructs.

  macOS iOS

  View sample code

• Mixing Metal and OpenGL Rendering in a View

  To assist in porting your application to Metal, learn how to incrementally transition your application's rendering from OpenGL. This application passes rendered content between textures managed by Metal and OpenGL.

  macOS iOS

  View sample code

• Capturing Metal Commands Programmatically

  Debug your rendering by invoking Metal’s frame capture from within your app. Save the resulting GPU trace to a file or view it in Xcode to explore the Metal commands produced by your app.

  macOS

  View sample code

• Supporting Simulator in a Metal App

  Learn how to run your Metal app on the iOS simulator while continuing to use Metal features only available on iOS devices.

  macOS iOS

  View sample code

• Modern Rendering with Metal

  Render a complex scene with the latest rendering techniques and effects. This sample uses advanced Metal features, such as indirect command buffers, sparse textures, and variable rate rasterization, to implement rendering algorithms that use GPU based mesh culling, tile based deferred lighting, ambient occlusion, volumetric fog, and cascaded shadow maps.

  macOS iOS

  View sample code

• LOD with Function Specialization

  Use Metal function constants to reduce the amount of shader code by creating multiple executable versions from a single source function. This sample demonstrates dynamic level of detail (LOD) selection for a model without needing separate shaders for each level of detail.

  macOS iOS tvOS

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• Reflections with Layer Section

  Render to a cubemap by selecting faces in a vertex shader. This sample demonstrates dynamic reflections on a chrome sphere, using layer selection to render the frame in two passes.

  macOS iOS

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• Deferred Lighting

  See how to implement efficient deferred lighting renderer with Metal. This sample makes use of the unique features available to the A-Series GPUs including programmable blending and memoryless textures. It also implements a more standard deferred lighting renderer for macOS.

  macOS iOS tvOS

  View sample code

• Dynamic Terrain with Argument Buffers

  Use argument buffers to implement a dynamic environment. This sample generates on an outdoor landscape, using argument buffers to select terrain materials, vegetation geometry, and particle effects within a GPU-driven pipeline

  macOS iOS tvOS

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• Forward Plus Lighting with Tile Shading

  Use a tile shader to accelerate a key parts of a forward plus renderer. This sample executes a tile shader to sort light volumes and direct fragment lighting calculations only to lights affecting each tile.

  iOS

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• Image Filter Graph with Heaps and Fences

  Reduce the memory usage of your application by allocating resources from a heap and perform explicit hazard tracking. This sample implements a multistage image filter which efficiently reuses memory from the heap for different tasks during processing.

  macOS iOS tvOS

  View sample code

• Image Filter Graph with Heaps and Events

  Use events to synchronize GPU operations and reduce memory usage. This sample demonstrates an alternative to using fences in implementing a multistage image filter.

  macOS iOS tvOS

  View sample code

• Metal for Accelerating Ray Tracing

  Use the ray-intersector functionality available in the Metal Performance Shaders framework to accelerate a path-traced renderer. This sample demonstrates how to cast primary, secondary, and shadow rays in a scene to simulate realistic lighting effects.

  macOS iOS

  View sample code

• Animating and Denoising a Raytraced Scene

  Render and denoise a dynamic scenes in your ray tracer with Metal Performance Shaders.

  macOS iOS

  View sample code

Accelerating graphics and much more.

Mac Metal Update Software

Metal provides near-direct access to the graphics processing unit (GPU), enabling you to maximize the graphics and compute potential of your apps on iOS, macOS, and tvOS. Building on an approachable, low-overhead architecture with precompiled GPU shaders, fine-grained resource control, and multithreading support, Metal further evolves support for GPU-driven command creation, simplifies working with the array of Metal-capable GPUs, and lets you tap into Pro power of Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR.

GPU-driven Compute Encoding

Moving beyond just rendering passes, Metal in iOS 13 and tvOS 13 empowers the GPU to construct its own compute commands with Indirect Compute Encoding. Now complete scenes using advanced culling and tessellation techniques can be built and scheduled with little or no CPU interaction.

Improved Raytracing Acceleration

Metal Performance Shaders (MPS) speed raytracing operations even more by moving the bounded volume hierarchy construction to the GPU. MPS also provide new, optimized de-noising filters in an essential collection of highly-optimized compute and graphics shaders.

Metal for Pro Apps

Professional content-creation apps can take advantage of outstanding enhancements in Metal on macOS Catalina. Metal Peer Groups make it easy to rapidly share data between multiple GPUs in Mac Pro without transferring through main memory. And enhancements to CAMetalLayer give you access to the High Dynamic Range capabilities of Pro Display XDR.

Mac Metal Update Settings

Simpler GPU Families

Developing with Metal is even easier with the dramatically simplified GPU Families. Three well-considered groupings allow you to easily target functionality that's common across all Metal-enabled GPUs, access unique capabilities of Apple-designed GPUs, and better harness supported third-party GPUs on macOS.

Metal Memory Debugger

Mac Metal Wisconsin

The Metal Memory Debugger gives fine-grained insight into how much memory Metal objects and rendering resources consume at runtime. It also analyzes how your resources are configured and suggests improvements, so you can deeply optimize your game or app to take full advantage of Metal.

Metal-enabled iOS Simulator

The Simulator now uses Metal to speed up the development of iOS apps that either use Metal directly or rely on Metal-based system frameworks. This is perfect for smoothly transitioning from OpenGL ES to Metal.

• What’s New in Metal

  Tools for Windows
  The Metal Developer Tools for Windows enables Metal Shading Language (MSL) compilation on Windows into Metal Library Objects targeting Apple platforms.

• Documentation

  Browse the latest documentation including API reference and articles.

• Sample Code

  Get sample code to see how Metal APIs are implemented.

• Videos

  Learn how to take advantage of the latest advancements in Metal.

• Forums

  Ask questions and discuss Metal with Apple engineers and other developers.