You know it's serious because Apple's Craig Federighi flipped a goat on stage at WWDC when he announced it. Metal. If the name sounds hardcore, it's because it's a hardcore improvement to the way games will be able to perform on iOS 8. Metal represents a much more no-nonsense approach to getting the most out of the Apple A7's gaming performance, assuring users of the iPhone 5S, iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display that their devices will continue to be top-notch game systems come this fall. Right now in iOS 7 software called OpenGL ES sits in between the game and the core hardware that runs it, translating function calls into graphics commands that are sent to the hardware. It's a lot of overhead. And iOS 8 is getting rid of a lot of it.

Apple has developed a faster way to do it. They call the new system Metal, and it's not a reference to heavy metal music. It's a nod to the programming expression "close to the metal." But in Apple's hands, it's even closer than that. Get an iPhone SE with Mint Mobile service for $30/mo What Metal means Apple senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi describes iOS 8 Metal as providing "near bare to the metal access to the power of A7." Federighi is talking about Apple's own A7 processor found in the iPhone 5s, iPad Air, and iPad mini with Retina Display. The A7 include's Apple's second generation custom CPU, Cyclone. It's 64-bit and based on the ARMv8 instruction set architecture. That's paired with an OpenGL 3.0 ES capable PowerVR Series 6 (Rogue) GPU, reportedly the G6430, and 1GB of DDR 3 RAM. Metal lets developers target the power of that GPU far more directly than ever before. And it's reasonable to assume the same will be true of Apple's next processor, the A8, ostensibly coming with the next major iPhone and iPads later this year. What Metal does

Draw calls, used to render all the objects in a scene in a 3D game, are up to ten times faster on the same hardware when using Metal. That means much faster, more responsive games with incredibly detailed environments. iOS 8 gets a bump in game load time performance thanks to support for precompiled shaders. Shaders affect how an environment is lit and colored; they're an incredibly important part of rendering a realistic and immersive gaming experience. Precompiling them enables them to load faster. With game developers always pushing the complexity envelope, this helps improve the user experience; after all, you don't want to sit around waiting for the game to load on your device.