On Monday, Apple announced a new gaming development platform, dubbed Metal, at its Worldwide Developer Conference. The platform, much like DirectX12 or Mantle, bypasses the overhead of OpenGL, which currently serves as the standard for 3D graphics in iOS games and apps.

Craig Federighi explained that Metal is designed for the A7 processor and provides complete access to the compute power of its GPU. To demonstrate the platform's increased efficiency, brief footage was shown of recent PopCap 3D shooting game Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, complete with 1.3 million triangles on screen at once, along with various depth-of-field effects. Federighi advertised the boost using Metal as "10 times" of what was available in the past.

Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney followed with a presentation of a cherry blossom tree and koi pond in a garden, complete with plenty of water reflection and particle effects. "Metal frees up enough compute resources that we can give all the fish in that koi pond their own intelligence," Sweeney added, before announcing that this "zen garden" demo would be made free in the App Store upon iOS 8's public launch "in the fall." iOS 8's beta launch, in the meantime, will be made available for developers today.