Metal C++ examples

Metal 4 support is required

A collection of open source C++ examples for Metal

metal-cpp

These examples use a modified version of metal-cpp published by Apple. This modified version is maintained here: metal-cpp and includes some additional API bindings not yet supported by Apple, however it is actively updated with the latest fixes and additions from Apple as well.

Requirements

These samples are developed using C++23 and target the following platforms and os versions:

Platform	OS Version
macOS	26.0+
iOS	26.0+
tvOS	26.0+

Building

These example applications use Vcpkg, CMake and are actively developed using both CLion and Xcode

For those wanting to build the projects from a terminal invoking CMake directly or to generate the Xcode project files here are some example commands:

Ninja

   git clone --recursive https://github.com/MattGuerrette/Metal.git
   cd Metal
   cmake --preset macos-debug
   cmake --build out/build/macos-debug

Xcode

   git clone --recursive https://github.com/MattGuerrette/Metal.git
   cd Metal
   cmake --preset macos -DCMAKE_XCODE_ATTRIBUTE_DEVELOPMENT_TEAM=<Apple Developer ID>
   cmake --build out/build/macos

For codesigning purposes, you will want to specify the development team ID as shown above to avoid needing to manually set the development team for each target project.

Table of Contents

• Examples

Examples

Basics

01 - HelloWorld

Basic example for rendering a colored triangle using Metal

02 - Instancing

Rendering of multiple cube geometry instances

03 - Textures

Showcases loading of PNG textures using stb_image into a MTLHeap and using Argument Buffers to bindlessly render multiple textures from GPU memory.