Pipeline Creation

Overview

Covers Metal 4 pipeline state creation when porting games: loading pre-compiled metallibs, building render/compute/mesh PSOs via MTL4Compiler, function constants, flexible PSOs, color-attachment mapping, async compilation, and pipeline caching.

For compiling HLSL/DXIL shaders to metallibs, see the compiling-with-metal-shaderconverter skill. For compiling Metal shader language (MSL) source, see MSL Source Compilation below.

References

Read the relevant Metal 4 SDK header before writing pipeline code — the headers are the source of truth for property names, types, and method signatures.

• Metal 4 SDK headers - $(xcrun --show-sdk-path)/System/Library/Frameworks/Metal.framework/Headers/ — focus on MTL4Compiler.h, MTL4RenderPipeline.h, MTL4ComputePipeline.h, MTL4MeshRenderPipeline.h, MTL4TileRenderPipeline.h, MTL4LinkingDescriptor.h
• Apple documentation - Using the Metal 4 compilation API

Cross-API PSO Compatibility

Metal 3 PSOs work on Metal 4 encoders (and vice versa). This enables incremental porting — pipeline creation can be migrated to MTL4Compiler independently of encoder migration.