iOS metal API

1st Official Post

    Apple has always bragged about their new framework, Metal, in iOS. From how they described it, it'll will result in much better performance and graphics, and current Metal apps show that, especially with their shadowing. Considering that right now near airports in AF2 even iPad Air can lag quite a bit, is it possible to implement Metal for iOS in the future?

    And also, separately, is AF2 64-bit? Will 64-bit apps on 64-bit devices result in better performance, or nothing because iPads all have less than 2gb of RAM? Thanks!

    • Official Post

    Well 2GB or RAM isn't that much compared to what computers have now adays. But the bigger issue is the memory size for the 3D graphics card. I've heard of only 512 MB for one device, can't remember which mobile device it was, iPad ... . Compared to 2GB of typical graphics cards for computers, thats weak.

    Regards,
    Jan

    Regards,

    Jan

    Aerofly 2 on iOS is already running as a 64 Bit version, in case your iOS device supports this. The performance benefit however, is really not worth it, "maybe" around 5%.

    We have not yet investigated Metal for Aerofly 2 at it would require quite a lot of work to port our engine to the Metal API. We doubt it will give any significant performance boost to our simulator, the numbers you heard are highly special cases, that do not help Aerofly. Aerofly is already using OpenGL in a very optimized way, so we won't benefit from Metal that much.

    However we haven't done any tests yet, so it could actually help.