Tim Sweeney (left) and Josh Adams of Epic Games at Apple's WWDC 14 event.
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Graphics guru Tim Sweeney explains why Apple's Metal will make mobile games far better

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote on Monday, Tim Sweeney, the chief executive of Epic Games, and lead platform engineer Josh Adams showed off Unreal Engine 4 running on iOS 8, the new version of Apple’s mobile operating system.

The Unreal “Zen Garden” demo showed a beautiful Japanese garden with lots of koi, butterflies, and cherry blossoms — all moving like individual objects. Sweeney said the demo had 5,000 cherry blossoms floating on the screen. Such cool 3D graphics will soon be available on Apple’s mobile devices thanks to Metal.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.