The basic Metal object/code structure
To finish off our talk about Apple Metal, let's look at an overview of the API's object and code structuring. We already briefly saw some shader code in the Metal Shading Language, so let's see how we can work with this API in our projects.
|
Objects |
Purpose |
|---|---|
|
Device |
Reference to the GPU |
|
Command queue |
Serial sequence of command buffers |
|
Command buffer |
Contains GPU hardware commands |
|
Command encoder |
Translates API commands to GPU hardware commands |
|
State |
Framebuffer configuration, depth, samplers, blend, and so on |
|
Code |
Shaders (vertex, fragment, geometry, and tessellation) |
|
Resources |
Textures and Data Buffer Objects (vertices, constants, and so on) |
The preceding table represents the various types of objects that we'd work with if writing a game directly in the Metal API. They are the Device, the State, the Command Buffer, our Shaders, Textures, and many more.
We can import the Metal API into ViewController.swift class with the following:
import Metal...
