Metal is a low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated 3D graphic and compute shader application programming interface (API) developed by Apple Inc., and which debuted in iOS 8. Metal combines functions similar to OpenGL and OpenCL under one API. It is intended to bring to iOS, macOS, and tvOS apps some of the performance benefits of similar APIs on other platforms, such as Vulkan (which debuted in mid-February 2016) and Direct3D 12.