Does/will Swift take advantage of "Metal' in the new Mac OS X operating system

Improved performance is always welcome esp. when trying to keep older hardware useful.

From the Apple web site

“Metal is a new graphics core technology that gives games and apps near-direct access to the graphics processor on your Mac, delivering enhanced performance and a richer graphical experience. Metal speeds system-level graphics rendering by up to 50 percent,4 as well as making it up to 40 percent more efficient.5 Metal allows the main processor and graphics processor to work more effectively together, boosting high-performance apps. And Metal is designed to be great for games, improving draw call performance by up to 10x and paving the way for new levels of realism and detail.”

Metal will help a little, but Zwift isn’t really bottlenecked by the API at the moment so I wouldn’t expect it to show too much of an improvement.  The slowest part of a mac in general is the GPU, and in Zwift’s case the fill-rate of the GPU is particularly important - that is something that will be totally unaffected by Metal.

I’m curious about this as well. Is Zwift going to be adapted to take advantage of Metal? Admittedly, I don’t understand all the terminology at a very high level, but “Metal is designed to be great for games, improving draw cell performance by up to 10x and paving the way for new levels of realism and detail” sure sounds like something Zwift could benefit from.

I do understand the point, though, that the highest end graphics cards designed for gaming are not generally optimized or even available to work on Mac. 

Jon, if it’s not too much trouble, could you please provide more details on this as I think there are a lot of Mac users who want great Zwift performance without having to switch to a PC.

Also, does Zwift offer support for crossfire in Windows with dual GPUs?