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Updated 03/2022
Bitrise will take a pause on Metal support for a short period of time.
Although we were proud to share with you news below, we have to roll back Metal support for the next 2-3 months, due to stability issues our customers are reporting.
The issues are caused by Metal API bugs and they need to be addressed by our suppliers, including Apple. Therefore, we will disable Metal by default in the next release of macOS Intel stack, to isolate issues and make all patches and updates necessary.
Rest assured, if your project is impacted by this, please get in touch with us to request a stack with Metal support.
As soon as the bugs and issues are cleared, we will be back with Metal support.
You can run your iOS UI tests way faster now on Bitrise. Wouldn’t it be the perfect time to use this decrease to run more of them?
Testing takes time, sometimes a lot of time, we all know this. Time is precious, but running UI tests do have their benefits. Now that we provide better UI test performance on iOS simulators for customers, you could increase your test coverage.
The details
We provide better UI test performance on iOS simulators for customers using macOS 12.5 stack and above and the performance gain is available on Gen2 Elite and Elite XL machine types. We’ve benchmarked the benefits:
- 15% iOS UI test performance increase on macOS Elite XL
- 8% iOS UI test performance increase on macOS Elite
(Maybe you are still on an older stack, but once you’ll start using 12.5 or above you will also get the benefits.)
The performance benefit for UI tests on iOS simulators is present if you run your tests in normal or in headless iOS simulator mode.
We’ve just rolled out Metal to open beta. Metal is Apple’s low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated 3D graphic and compute shader API enabled on our macOS 12.5 stacks and above. The performance gain for UI tests on iOS simulators is due to the hardware-accelerated virtual GPU being used via the Metal APIs (instead of the CPU).
Start enjoying our speedy UI testing offer today, although Metal is still in beta and please provide us feedback on Metal API.
Happy building!
