Apple caused a certain amount of disquiet in cross-platform development circles when it announced its Metal graphics API as part of iOS 8 in mid 2014.

Now, however, balance has been bought back to the OpenGL ecosystem with the news that Canadian tech company The Brenwill Workshop has released MetalGL.

This is an implementation of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API that also runs Metal.

Same tools, different result

The result is that developers can continue to use their standard OpenGL pipeline and GLSL shaders etc while still gaining the performance boost that Metal gives on supported iOS devices.

The Brenwill Workshop says that using MetalGL will enable 3 times the numbers of draw calls on these devices.

"With MetalGL, developers have the opportunity to triple the performance of their OpenGL ES 2.0 games and apps on iOS devices without having to rewrite a single line of their game logic, OpenGL framework calls, or shaders", said Bill Hollings, president of The Brenwill Workshop.

You can find out more details about the technology, which costs $239 for a single licence including popular extensions for iOS, via the MetalGL website.