Apple has released the first public beta of its next operating system update, OS X 10.11 El Capitan - named for the rock formation in Yosemite National Park.
Available free of charge to all Apple customers with compatible systems under the relatively new Apple Seed beta-test programme, which launched with the public betas of OS X 10.10 Yosemite, El Capitan brings with it a new graphics technology, Metal, which is claimed to boost performance considerably.
Appearing in El Capitan for the first time, OS X Metal is a low-latency API similar in concept to AMD's Mantle and the Khronos Group's Vulkan. With up to a tenfold increase in draw call performance, Apple's internal testing claims that Metal will boost the performance of games considerably while also increasing system-level graphics rendering performance by 50 per cent and 40 per cent more efficient. Other performance increases in the underlying operating system include claims of a twofold boost in application switching and email display, fourfold in PDF opening, and up to 1.4 times faster application launches.
El Capitan also brings other advances: a new Notes application is designed to compete with Microsoft's OneNote, Mail now features Calendar integration and an enhanced full-screen view, the Spotlight search system has been tweaked to support natural-language queries and more data sources, Mission Control has been overhauled, and OS X finally gets a native Split View mode - something rival operating systems have had for some time - for easily viewing two applications at once without needing to manually resize their windows.
The OS X 10.11 El Capitan preview is available now, as a 6GB download from iTunes, for all beta programme members. The update does come with some compatibility warnings, however, including the news that selected 32-bit applications - including popular writing tool Scrivener - are known to quit unexpectedly, with an update to resolve the issue promised in the near future.
Available free of charge to all Apple customers with compatible systems under the relatively new Apple Seed beta-test programme, which launched with the public betas of OS X 10.10 Yosemite, El Capitan brings with it a new graphics technology, Metal, which is claimed to boost performance considerably.
Appearing in El Capitan for the first time, OS X Metal is a low-latency API similar in concept to AMD's Mantle and the Khronos Group's Vulkan. With up to a tenfold increase in draw call performance, Apple's internal testing claims that Metal will boost the performance of games considerably while also increasing system-level graphics rendering performance by 50 per cent and 40 per cent more efficient. Other performance increases in the underlying operating system include claims of a twofold boost in application switching and email display, fourfold in PDF opening, and up to 1.4 times faster application launches.
El Capitan also brings other advances: a new Notes application is designed to compete with Microsoft's OneNote, Mail now features Calendar integration and an enhanced full-screen view, the Spotlight search system has been tweaked to support natural-language queries and more data sources, Mission Control has been overhauled, and OS X finally gets a native Split View mode - something rival operating systems have had for some time - for easily viewing two applications at once without needing to manually resize their windows.
The OS X 10.11 El Capitan preview is available now, as a 6GB download from iTunes, for all beta programme members. The update does come with some compatibility warnings, however, including the news that selected 32-bit applications - including popular writing tool Scrivener - are known to quit unexpectedly, with an update to resolve the issue promised in the near future.
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