As for the consumer edition of El Capitan, Apple hasn’t publicized official system requirements on its website yet and likely won’t until the free software update makes its debut this fall. OS X El Capitan Developer Preview runs on every Mac capable of supporting OS X Mavericks. Step 2: A window will pop up with basic information about your system, including a version of the operating system installed and its model year.Īs the screenshot attests, my daily driver is a mid-2013 13-inch MacBook Air so I’ll be enjoying the benefits of Metal when El Capitan arrives. Step 1: Choose About This Mac in the Apple menu. Tell us in comments! How to determine if OS X El Capitan’s Metal supports your Mac Mid-2012 and later 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display.Late-2012 and later 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display.Late-2013 and later 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display.Specifically, Metal will support any Mac model from the late-2012 Mac mini onward, including late-2012 iMacs (including Retina 5K models), the new mid-2012 Mac Pro, mid-2012 MacBook Airs, 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pros (Retina and non-Retina) and the new twelve-inch MacBook with Retina screen.įor fans of bulleted lists, the following models are supported:

Metal for Mac takes advantage of modern GPUs from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.Īpple has said that Metal will be supported on Macs made since 2012, meaning older models won’t experience speed increases promised by Metal. Photo apps, games and video editing software like Adobe After Effects will experience up to ten times faster draw call performance by offloading certain tasks from the CPU onto the GPU.īut does your Mac sport modern hardware needed to support Metal’s features? It’s dead simple to determine this for yourself, here’s how.

Like on iOS, El Capitan’s Metal significantly reduces the overhead of graphics frameworks such as OpenGL by enabling low-level access to your Mac’s graphics subsystem. In addition to making El Capitan’s user interface and apps perform smoother than before, Metal for Mac is absolutely huge news for game developers and makers of graphics-intensive apps. When OS X 10.11 El Capitan launches this fall, it will feature Metal, a graphics framework Apple originally introduced for iPhones, iPads and iPods following the release of iOS 8 last fall.

Metal supported gpu