Metal by George Ostrobrod

Build a practical mental model of Apple’s Metal API—from GPU resources and command submission to rendering, compute, profiling, and diagnostics. Metal: From Fundamentals to Practice is a technical guide to GPU programming on Apple platforms. Rather than treating Metal as a catalogue of APIs, it connects the concepts behind them with real development workflows: how resources, pipelines, and synchronization fit together, how the GPU executes work, and how to investigate what happens when things go wrong. The book covers Metal architecture and resources, rendering and compute pipelines, shaders, Metal Performance Shaders, MPSGraph, SwiftUI integration, GPU Frame Capture, profiling, Metal System Trace, and practical diagnostic techniques. You’ll learn how to: • Build a coherent mental model of Metal and GPU execution • Design and reason about rendering and compute workloads • Work with buffers, textures, shaders, pipelines, and synchronization • Use Xcode’s GPU capture and profiling tools effectively • Establish performance baselines and investigate GPU problems • Develop diagnostic techniques that remain useful as tools and APIs evolve Written for developers who want to understand not only how to use Metal, but why the system behaves the way it does.