The Apple Metal API and the graphics pipeline

One of the rules, if not the golden rule of modern video game development, is to keep our games running constantly at 60 frames per second or greater. If developing for VR devices and applications, this is of even more importance as dropped frame rates could lead to a sickening and game ending experience for the player.

In the past, being lean was the name of the game; hardware limitations prevented much from not only being written to the screen but how much memory storage a game could hold. This limited the number of scenes, characters, effects, and levels. In the past, game development was built more with an engineering mindset, so the developers made the things work with what little they had. Many of the games on 8-bit systems and earlier had levels and characters that were only different because of elaborate sprite slicing and recoloring.

Over time, advances in hardware, particularly that of GPUs allowed for richer graphical experiences. This...