Raster Order Groups – provide ordered memory access from fragment shaders and facilitate features such as order-independent transparency, dual-layer G-buffers, and voxelization.Tile memory from one phase is available to any subsequent fragment phases. Tile memory is GPU on-chip memory that improves performance by storing intermediate results locally instead of using the device memory. Tile Shading – is a rendering technique that allows fragment and compute shaders to access persistent tile memory between the two rendering phases.They are integrated with fragment and compute shaders.

Imageblocks – is not a new concept on iOS devices, however, Metal 2 on A11 lets us treat imageblocks (which are structured image data in tile memory) as data structures with granular and full control.

Let’s look briefly into some of these features: Some of these features are also available for macOS devices. Note: I only included features that are new for A11 and not available for A10 or earlier. It includes only what Metal 2introduces for the A11 devices. It also features a new Neural Engine hardware addition, for machine learning.īelow is a table I made out of the Metal Feature Sets document. Internal tests state it is 30% faster than the previous GPU inside the A10. The new processor, called A11 Bionic, has the first Apple-designed GPU which comes with three cores.

When the new A11-powered iPhone models (8, 8 Plus and X) were announced in the September Event keynote, the new GPU Family 4 webpage and a series of new Metal videos labeled Fall 2017were published.

Metal gpus