Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

AmazingTechGeek

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 6, 2015
685
305
Los Angeles
Performance might be shaky now and then, but I find improvements in rendering. Example, Safari web pages load quicker compared to iOS 8.
 
I'm glad you point this out too! I was thinking safari is a little quicker now also and it's what's keeping me from going back to 8.4 right now because I use safari a lot on my iPhone and I'm enjoying the snappiness! :) Otherwise I haven't seen anything else either with the metal. Hopefully those tweaks come with the next build.
 
  • Like
Reactions: AmazingTechGeek
Glad someone posted this, I just can't see/feel any improvements from this and "metal" is one of the things they focussed on in the keynote and it's on their feature list on the web. Are the benefits to come or only to be found in the 6S?
 
Performance might be shaky now and then, but I find improvements in rendering. Example, Safari web pages load quicker compared to iOS 8.
Is the page load time enhancement really due to Metal? Shouldn't it be due to general OS improvements in iOS 9 like Wi-Fi/Cellular handling, file processing and so on?

I would think that the Metal improvements in iOS 9 would be more obvious in games & graphics/video editing app since Metal is also in iOS 8. I would expect Metal to make a bigger difference with its introduction in OS X El Capitan.
 
Last edited:
Like hojx mentioned. Metal wouldn't really help in web pages loading. But the improvements made to Metal in iOS 9 should make games/video editing (as mentioned by hojx) and overall OS animation visuals more snappy and smooth when compared to iOS 8.
 
Like hojx mentioned. Metal wouldn't really help in web pages loading. But the improvements made to Metal in iOS 9 should make games/video editing (as mentioned by hojx) and overall OS animation visuals more snappy and smooth when compared to iOS 8.

Hopefully they make it work for GM, because as of now (PB 2), there are virtually no improvements in animation smoothness compared to iOS 8.
 
Certain games which previously dropped frames, now run smoothly plus iOS animations on a 6 Plus stutter far less.
 
PB 2 iOS 9 Feels snappier than iOS 9 pb 1, but animations stutter a wee bit more than iOS 8.

My experience though so far with iOS 9 has been much better than iOS 8 beta last year and iOS 8.3/4 public beta's earlier this year - which is promising for the final release
 
Apple's iOS 9 preview page mentions Metal speeding up page rendering.
"The apps in iOS 9 now take advantage of Metal, making more efficient use of the CPU and GPU to deliver faster scrolling, smoother animation, and better overall performance. Email, messages, web pages, and PDFs render faster. And multitasking features on iPad feel fluid and natural."
 
  • Like
Reactions: nathanalf and marvz
PB 2 iOS 9 Feels snappier than iOS 9 pb 1, but animations stutter a wee bit more than iOS 8.

My experience though so far with iOS 9 has been much better than iOS 8 beta last year and iOS 8.3/4 public beta's earlier this year - which is promising for the final release
Yeah I'm not going to say iOS 9 is bad, but it definitely has its issues in terms of speed and smoothness. Most problematic thing on my 6 is opening apps, there's a large delay with the icon darkened after tapping it, then the app opens. Often times there are frame drops when this happens.

My iPad mini 2 is in an odd area in terms of performance. A few things are better than iOS 8 while most everything is the same or even worse unfortunately. I still want to see these things fixed for the mini 2, though. These have all stuttered, even since iOS 7: Rotating keyboard, rotating spotlight (got much worse with iOS 8) rotate power off screen (became an issue with 7.1) rotate App Store, control/notification center over keyboard, Siri animation, keyboard popping up lag, pop-up menu with keyboard (I.e composing new message from share sheet, entering wifi password for network in settings), and finally, one of the biggies, "app to homescreen" stutter.

The most horribly problematic thing though, introduced with iOS 9, is the app switcher. Once you have 3-4+ apps, entering/entering the switcher is carried out at <~30fps. Scrolling is pretty bad, but especially bad around the homescreen "card". Even swiping away apps to close them has a low frame rate.

I really expected more from Metal. We still have 1-2 more betas though, so let's see how things pan out. Isn't there real-time debugging going on the background at all times during earlier betas, and once that's removed, things improve a lot? I am hoping for one update to just bring groundbreaking "smoothing over" of everything but I'm not so sure it will happen for my iPad.
 
  • Like
Reactions: TommyA6
Yeah I'm not going to say iOS 9 is bad, but it definitely has its issues in terms of speed and smoothness. Most problematic thing on my 6 is opening apps, there's a large delay with the icon darkened after tapping it, then the app opens. Often times there are frame drops when this happens.

My iPad mini 2 is in an odd area in terms of performance. A few things are better than iOS 8 while most everything is the same or even worse unfortunately. I still want to see these things fixed for the mini 2, though. These have all stuttered, even since iOS 7: Rotating keyboard, rotating spotlight (got much worse with iOS 8) rotate power off screen (became an issue with 7.1) rotate App Store, control/notification center over keyboard, Siri animation, keyboard popping up lag, pop-up menu with keyboard (I.e composing new message from share sheet, entering wifi password for network in settings), and finally, one of the biggies, "app to homescreen" stutter.

The most horribly problematic thing though, introduced with iOS 9, is the app switcher. Once you have 3-4+ apps, entering/entering the switcher is carried out at <~30fps. Scrolling is pretty bad, but especially bad around the homescreen "card". Even swiping away apps to close them has a low frame rate.

I really expected more from Metal. We still have 1-2 more betas though, so let's see how things pan out. Isn't there real-time debugging going on the background at all times during earlier betas, and once that's removed, things improve a lot? I am hoping for one update to just bring groundbreaking "smoothing over" of everything but I'm not so sure it will happen for my iPad.
Imagine 8.4, but smoother.

You'll be fine.
 
The way I read and understand it is that developers can use metal for games to access the hardware better but now Apple is bringing metal to the os so the os should be smooth and run better.
This.
Apple's iOS 9 preview page mentions Metal speeding up page rendering.
"The apps in iOS 9 now take advantage of Metal, making more efficient use of the CPU and GPU to deliver faster scrolling, smoother animation, and better overall performance. Email, messages, web pages, and PDFs render faster. And multitasking features on iPad feel fluid and natural."
And this.
With iOS 8 Metal could be used by app developers for games and so on, but now Apple is using Metal for core apps and the OS itself.
 
  • Like
Reactions: februarian
Certain games which previously dropped frames, now run smoothly plus iOS animations on a 6 Plus stutter far less.

Any examples? Asphalt 8 has some of the best graphics of any game for me but on the iPhone 6 Plus it drops frames even on iOS 9.
 
Couple of games actually where the whole experience is changed, games like Threes!, OneMoreDash, OneMoreLine.
 
It is probably too early to tell but I think I can already see some improvements on iPad Air 2.
Safari scrolling to me defiantly seems smother but scrolling through albums or movies on the other hand is still choppy, especially the first 2-3 seconds.
I also seem to get very little stutter with iOS 9, compared to 8 which seems to be an improvement. For a beta it's pretty damn good already and hopefully there will be more improvements when the GM is released.
 
So metal code be used for UI calls and could give the appearance that it is working faster but indeed it might be just about as fast. The render of a page would not interact with metal. Safari might interact with Metal if they are using it to render some of the graphics. I would say it is optimizations of the render engine inside safari. These are lurches forward in builds as there is a nightly build of the rendering engine since it is used all over the web. I also suspect that the whole OS has more of a RAM diet and this allows safari just a touch more resources. The iPhone 6 should have shipped with 2 gigs of ram to accommodate the beastly mess of iOS 8 but that is another story all together. I would say the iPad air 2 should see the best bump with iOS 9 as clearly the hardware was over kill for iOS 8. I look forward to a stable and clean release this time. I know that is probably wishful thinking though
 
  • Like
Reactions: XTheLancerX
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.