As with iOS, Metal in OS X El Capitan significantly reduces the graphics overhead that can occur on your computer when running OpenGL libraries, allowing low-level access to your Mac's graphics subsystem. Both photo applications and games and video editing software such as Adobe After Effects, will experience a clear improvement, being able to execute different actions up to ten times faster by offloading certain tasks to the CPU and GPU.
But how can we know if our Mac will be compatible with Metal and will take advantage of all these improvements. Then we leave you the list of Macs that will be supported.
First of all clarify that Metal for Mac takes advantage of the capabilities of all modern GPUs from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel. In this sense, Apple has confirmed that Metal will support Macs released since 2012, that is, older models will not experience these speed increases promised by Metal.
Specifically, Metal will support any late 2012 Mac model, starting with the Mac mini onwards, including late 2012 iMac, mid 2012 Mac Pro, mid 2012 MacBook Air, 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pros (Retina and non-Retina), and the new twelve-inch MacBook with Retina display.
To find out which computer model you have, you just have to go to the upper left corner on the desktop, click on > About this Mac and check the date that appears, in my case I am just at the limit with my iMac from the end of 2012 to take advantage of these benefits, as Metal is up to 40 percent more efficient when it comes to OpenGL rendering, according to Apple.
Metal combines the computing power of OpenCL and the graphical power of OpenGL in a high-performance API that does both.