i. What You Need

To follow along with the tutorials in this book, you need the following:

• A Metal-capable Mac running macOS Catalina 10.15 or later. All Macs built since 2012 should run Metal, although not all of them will be able to run the most recent features in Metal 2. Nvidia GPUs will have issues, in some cases serious, as drivers have not been updated since macOS High Sierra.
• Xcode 11.0 or later.
• [optional] A Metal-capable iPhone or iPad running iOS 13 or later. Any iOS device running the A7 chip or later will run Metal. The latest features, such as tile shading and imageblocks, will only run on the A11 (or later) chipset. The projects will build and run on macOS, and most of them will run on the iOS Simulator, so using an iOS device is optional. If you wish to make an iOS game, the game engine you build while reading this book will have an iOS target as well. The Metal API, with a few exceptions, works the same on macOS as it does on iOS so it won’t be difficult to add an iOS target to your project later on.