Getting started with Metal APIs— with UIView and SwiftUI
Unleashing the Power of GPU Programming with Metal
Metal is a powerful and low-level framework for graphics and computer programming on Apple platforms. It allows you to take full advantage of the performance of the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) in order to perform complex computations and rendering tasks.
One of the main use cases for Metal is image processing, as it allows you to perform operations on images and videos in real time with high performance and low overhead.
In this blog post, we will dive into the world of Metal by drawing a triangle.
We will cover the basics of Metal programming, including the main concepts and terminology. Plus steps for setting up your development environment.
Blog outline:
Setting up your environment
Understanding Metal Shaders usage
Brief Intro about Creating and Using Shaders in Metal
Understanding Pipelines and State
Use Metal in a ViewController
Setting up the initial view
Setting up a Metal view
Creating a Metal layer
Create a vertex buffer
Creating a render pipeline state
Rendering the Triangle
Use Metal in SwiftUI
Conclusion
By the end of this blog, you should have a solid understanding of how to use Metal to create simple 3D graphics, and be ready to take on more advanced Metal projects. We will end up creating an app that draws this triangle.
For implementation details, check out canopas blog.