OS X El Capitan supports Metal, Apple's graphics API introduced in iOS 8 to speed up performance in games and professional applications. The maximum amount of memory that could be allocated to the graphics processor has been increased from 1024 MB to 1536 MB on Macs with an Intel HD 4000 GPU. Compared to OS X Yosemite, Apple says that opening PDFs is four times faster, app switching and viewing messages in Mail is twice as fast and launching apps is 40% faster. OS X El Capitan includes features to improve the security, performance, design and usability of OS X. The upgrade varies in size depending upon which Apple Mac computer it is being installed on in most scenarios, it will require about 6 GB of disk space. The following computers support features such as Handoff, Instant Hotspot, AirDrop between Mac computers and iOS devices, as well as the new Metal API:
They can only run OS X El Capitan if they have at least 2GB of RAM. Of these computers, the following models were equipped with 1GB RAM as the standard option on the base model when they were shipped originally. These computers can run El Capitan, provided they have at least 2GB of RAM: For example, Apple notes that the newly available Metal API is available on 'all Macs since 2012'.
