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Apple IOS

Coding to the Metal: How Apple’s iOS 8 has the potential to take mobile gaming to the next level

By Chris Kingsley

September 23, 2014 | 4 min read

One of the footnotes of Apple’s big reveal recently was its introduction of Metal into iOS 8.

The Asphalt 8: Airborne game has been upgraded for Metal

Whilst the world was drooling over the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus, with their larger screens and more powerful processors, games developers were raising a glass to the future of mobile gaming and being able to get ‘closer to the metal’ when coding games for the new Apple operating system.

Rebellion is one of the few UK companies that has publicly announced support for Metal, and we’re in fantastic company alongside the likes of EA, Disney, Ubisoft and Super Evil MegaCorp.

Together, we’re now able to develop mobile games that will look and feel much more like console games, with advanced graphics and smoother, faster gameplay.

How will Metal help us do this? Well, in layman’s terms, it significantly reduces the translation bottlenecks when our games communicate with the graphics hardware on iPhone or iPad. The graphics API is the translator between our game code and the graphics hardware which does the actual drawing of the game – it’s an interpreter between game language and pixel speak, if you like. Until now on smartphones we’ve had to use a standardised one-size-fits-all graphics API but that has tended to lead to games that support the lowest common denominator.

Consoles punch above their weight compared with PC games because the code doesn’t need as much translation into the varying hardware languages that different graphics hardware speaks. So, even though console hardware is less powerful than equivalent PCs, graphically advanced games are often faster and more striking.

Coding ‘closer to the metal’ means writing more directly to the hardware. With the aptly-named Metal, Apple has streamlined the API and unified the language between game code and pixel, so we can make better use of the advanced graphics and the larger screens of the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus.

When combined with the new 64-bit A8 processor, with its 25 per cent speed boost and 50 per cent increase in graphics performance, Apple has given us the tools to take mobile gaming to the next level.

The promise of more advanced mobile graphics and faster mobile gameplay aren’t the only advantages of Metal however. The harder the API has to work, the more battery life is drained, which is why certain games suck the blood from your phone and make your smartphones into very effective hand-warmers.

On Metal, we expect this to be resolved as well.

Some developers will complain that tweaking games to support both the new 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch screens, as well as the existing iPhone 5S’s 4-inch screen involves more work. In truth though, expert smartphone game developers have long-since adapted to designing and coding for different devices, especially around Android screen size fragmentation.

Apple has realised that larger screens will stem the defection of gamers onto devices like the Galaxy from Samsung. And by giving us Metal to play with, it’s now up to us to grow mobile gaming into the dominant force it has the true potential to become.

Chris Kingsley is co-founder and CTO of Rebellion

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