Apple shows off dev-friendly back-end with EA and Epic games
During Apple's WWDC 14 conference today, it introduced a developer back-end called Metal, and showed it off with EA and Epic projects.
Update: Corrected the name of Crytek's demo. Shacknews regrets the error.
E3 is next week, and that means it's Apple's time to shine with its annual WWDC conference. Today during the presentation, the company introduced iOS 8, along with a backend called "Metal" that allows developers to directly access the CPU and graphics processor.
As a proof of concept, the company showed Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare from EA, and The Collectibles from Crytek, both running on an iPad. Granted, it only showed PvZ as a cutscene, and this is far from a guarantee of an iPad port, but Apple boasted that it shows off the power of the platform.
Epic Games then took the stage to show a custom-created Zen Garden in Unreal Engine 4 (above) that it made using Metal. It included a tree with 5,000 petals, a koi pond with hundreds of fish, and interactive objects like the sand and a water fountain. It will be available for free on the App Store, once iOS 8 launches later this year.
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, Apple shows off dev-friendly back-end with EA and Epic games.
During Apple's WWDC 14 conference today, it introduced a developer back-end called Metal, and showed it off with EA and Epic projects.-
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Essentially. They also announced real-time compiling(SWIFT) which is AWESOME if not new. While not new, this is the first MAJOR company coming out with an option for it. It wow'ed people a few years ago but was extremely difficult to setup. Now it's in the xCode app. Can't wait for more languages to implement this feature!
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The next few years are going to very interesting on the GPGPU front. It seems everyone is trying to unify and solve the bottlenecks between communicating between the CPU and GPU.
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Wait a minute... that Zen Garden demo looks a lot like something that NVidia packaged with the first GeForce way back in 2000. It's not exactly the same, but the general theme looks very familiar.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cube_map_ogl_tutorial.html (scroll down to "A Cube Map Texturing Example")
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