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Learn how to use Apple’s new low-level and high performance 3D graphics API in this iOS 8 Metal tutorial.

In iOS 8, Apple released a new API for GPU-accelerated 3D graphics called Metal.

Metal is similar to OpenGL ES, in that it is a low-level API for interacting with 3D graphics hardware.

The difference is that Metal is not cross platform. Instead, it is designed to be extremely efficient with Apple hardware, offering much improved speed and low overhead compared to using OpenGL ES.

In this tutorial, you’ll get some hands-on experience using Metal and Swift to create a bare-bones app: drawing a simple triangle. In the process, you’ll learn about some of the most important classes in Metal, such as devices, command queues, and more.

This tutorial is designed so that anyone can go through it, regardless of your 3D graphics background – however, we will go fairly quickly. If you do have some prior 3D programming or OpenGL experience you will find things much easier, as many of the concepts you’re already familiar with apply to Metal.

Read full tutorial on raywenderlich.com