Metal Performance Tester is a comprehensive tool for testing GPU performance regressions in Metal applications.
This tool provides precise GPU performance measurement, statistical analysis, and automated regression detection for Metal-based applications.
- Real GPU Performance Counters: Uses actual Metal performance counter data from GPU hardware for authentic performance measurement.
- Graphics & Compute Testing: Separate testing pipelines for graphics rendering and compute workloads with dedicated baseline management.
- Hardware-Based Metrics: Captures real GPU metrics including stage utilization, memory bandwidth, cache performance, and instruction counts directly from GPU hardware.
- Multiple Test Configurations: Provides pre-defined presets for both graphics and compute scenarios, from low to max complexity testing.
For information on the Metal API see the official documentation.
- Robust Statistical Analysis: Implements Welch's t-test for proper statistical analysis of samples with unequal variances, with configurable significance levels.
- Confidence Intervals: Calculates 95% confidence intervals for performance differences to quantify the margin of error.
- Simplified Output: Clean, focused performance metrics without unnecessary complexity for easier analysis.
- Dual Detection Methods: Supports both statistical significance testing and simple threshold-based regression detection.
For detailed examples of how to use the Metal Performance Tester in practical development scenarios, see Use Cases.
This document includes uses for:
- Game Development - Adding visual effects and performance validation
- Graphics Programming - Shader optimization and pipeline analysis
- QA Engineering - Release validation and automated testing
The Metal Performance Tester provides both Xcode and command-line interfaces for different workflows.
For information on installation and usage, see Installation and Usage.
For information on graphics baselines, see Graphics Baseline Output.
For information on the compute baselines, see Compute Baseline Output.
- macOS: 15.0 or later
- Xcode: 15.0 or later
- Swift: 5.0 or later
- Metal: 2.0 or later
- Metal-compatible GPU: Required for performance counter sampling
- Apple Silicon: Native Metal performance and compute counter support
| Apple M1 | Apple M2 | Apple M3 | Apple M4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base | Base | Base | Base |
| Pro | Pro | Pro | Pro |
| Max | Max | Max | Max |
| Ultra | Ultra | Ultra |
- Apple Discrete GPUs: Radeon Pro 5000/6000/7000 series (in Mac Pro, iMac Pro, and some MacBook Pro models)
- Recent Integrated GPUs: Intel Iris Xe (Intel-based Macs), Apple integrated graphics
- Pre-Metal GPUs: GPUs without Metal support
- GPUs without Counter Sampling: Older integrated graphics without performance counter support
For troubleshooting see the Troubleshooting guide.
This project is licensed under the MIT License.