Render advanced 3D graphics and perform data-parallel computations. Get fine-grained access to the GPU while minimizing CPU overhead. The Metal Framework provides extremely low-overhead access to the GPU, enabling incredibly high performance for your sophisticated graphics rendering and computational tasks. Metal eliminates many performance bottlenecks—such as costly state validation—that are found in traditional graphics APIs. Metal moves all expensive state translation and compilation operations out of the critical path of your most performance sensitive rendering code. It provides precompiled shaders, state objects, and explicit command scheduling to ensure that your application achieves the highest possible performance and efficiency. Graphics, compute, and blit commands can be used together seamlessly and efficiently. Metal is specifically designed to exploit modern architectural considerations, such as multiprocessing and shared memory, to make it easy to parallelize the creation of GPU commands.

The UserNotifications framework (UserNotifications.framework) supports the delivery and handling of local and remote notifications. You use the classes of this framework to schedule the delivery of local notifications based on specific conditions, such as time or location. Apps and extensions also use this framework to receive and potentially modify local and remote notifications when they are delivered to the user’s device.

Create view-level services for media playback, complete with user controls, chapter navigation, and support for subtitles and closed captioning.

Core Audio is the digital audio infrastructure of iOS and OS X. It includes a set of software frameworks designed to handle the audio needs in your applications. Read this chapter to learn what you can do with Core Audio.

The Core Graphics framework is based on the Quartz advanced drawing engine. It provides low-level, lightweight 2D rendering with unmatched output fidelity. You use this framework to handle path-based drawing, transformations, color management, offscreen rendering, patterns, gradients and shadings, image data management, image creation, and image masking, as well as PDF document creation, display, and parsing.