Maths, Metal, Mandelbrot, and SwiftUI

Maths, Metal, Mandelbrot, and SwiftUI

Heavy metal mathematics on the GPU (in 10 easy steps)

Jacob Bartlett

Oct 7

I love the chance to play around with Metal shaders.

You can go from an incredibly simple rule, sometimes even just a Tweet-sized line of code, and get remarkable graphical complexity. Xor, the shader God, is a generational talent when it comes to this, with code-golfed tweet-sized shader worlds.

But, mathematically, there is only one GOAT: Benoit Mandelbrot, who coined the term “fractal” and pioneered their exploration with computers. His eponymous Mandelbrot Set is the coolest bit of pure mathematics ever imagined. It creates a shape with infinitely recursive fine structure, from one simple (or, perhaps complex) rule:

I’ll get into the mathematics later: this post takes you through building your own fully-functional Mandelbrot set explorer app using SwiftUI and Metal:

• 10 mostly-simple steps.

• 51 lines of SwiftUI code.

• 39 lines of Metal code.

That’s it. Really. And I promise not to ‘the rest of the owl’ you at any point.

Sponsored Link

Is your mobile app under attack right now?

Discover why real-time threat monitoring is crucial to your cybersecurity posture through a simulated attack demo.

Join GuardSquare on Oct 20th to uncover why threat monitoring is essential to the complete, end-to-end protection of your mobile app.

Sign up here.

10 Simple Steps

1. Setting up the Metal project

2. Utilising position in our shader

3. Applying the physical bounds

4. Our first Mandelbrot iteration

5. Running a few iterations

6. More and more (and more) iterations

7. Colouring the escaping pixels

8. Giving SwiftUI a camera

9. Dragging around the screen

10. The Mandelbrot Zoom™

1. Setting up the Metal project

Metal is incredibly well suited to drawing fractals, because the GPU can crunch thousands of pixels in parallel. Each pixel is associated with a different value on the x and y axes of our number line, and can be computed independently.

You know the drill.

In Xcode, add a new Metal file named Mandelbrot.metal.

#include <metal_stdlib>
#include <SwiftUI/SwiftUI_Metal.h>
using namespace metal;

[[ stitchable ]]
half4 mandelbrot(float2 position) {
    return half4(0.0h, 0.0h, 1.0h, 1.0h);
}

Metal is a platform-exclusive language based on C++.

A few important things to note:

• [[stitchable]] exposes our shader to SwiftUI.

• SwiftUI supplies float2 position, a vector (list) of 2 floats, the x and y position of a pixel.

• We return half4, a vector of 4 half-width floats, representing RGBA values.

We can apply our shader to a SwiftUI view using ShaderLibrary.mandelbrot().

import SwiftUI

@main
struct MetalMandelbrotApp: App {
    var body: some Scene {
        WindowGroup {
            MandelbrotView()
        }
    }
}

struct MandelbrotView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Rectangle()
            .fill(ShaderLibrary.mandelbrot())
            .ignoresSafeArea()
    }
}

Hey Presto, our shader works!

It almost makes you want to cry happy tears. Back in the day, you would have to muck around quite a bit with build settings to get the shader library to behave.

2. Utilising position in our shader

Let’s spin our wheels for a couple of steps and make sure we can manipulate our shader in a few simple ways. Let’s apply the x-value of position to the blue value.

[[ stitchable ]]
half4 mandelbrot(float2 position) {
    float horizontal = position.x / 500.0;
    return half4(0.0h, 0.0h, half(horizontal), 1.0h);
}

Now the B channel is modulated by horizontal position.

This is neat, but it randomly cuts off into “pure blue” quite early.

3. Applying the physical bounds

SwiftUI allows us to pass the bounds of our view or shape into a shader as an argument. Like so:

struct MandelbrotView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Rectangle()
            .fill(ShaderLibrary.mandelbrot(.boundingRect))
            .ignoresSafeArea()
    }
}

This boundingRect supplies 4 numbers: (x position, y position, width, height). You know by now this argument will be a float4.

[[ stitchable ]]
half4 mandelbrot(float2 position, float4 bounds) {
    float horizontal = (position.x - bounds.x) / bounds.z;
    return half4(0.0h, 0.0h, half(horizontal), 1.0h);
}

bounds.x is the left edge of our bounding rectangle, and bounds.z is the width. Instead of guessing, now our blue value is proportional to the pixel’s horizontal position along the whole size of the bounds.

Now we very smoothly apply the blueness across our view’s width.

Finally, we can also work in 2 dimensions:

[[ stitchable ]]
half4 mandelbrot(float2 position, float4 bounds) {
    float2 normalised = (position - bounds.xy) / bounds.zw;
    return half4(half(normalised.x), half(normalised.y), 0.0h, 1.0h);
}

“Normalising” means tuning values to between 0 and 1, so we can get a valid RGB value from each screen pixel position.

Metal is full of syntactic shortcuts: here, we create a float2 for horizontal and vertical values simultaneously by applying float2 in each step of the equation: bounds.xy is a float2 of its x (horizontal origin) and y (vertical origin), whereas bounds.zw is a float2 of the z (width) and w (height) values.

4. Our first Mandelbrot iteration

Let’s get serious now and introduce complex numbers. If you get through this step, the rest is easy. Stick with it 🫡.

Imaginary numbers are made by square rooting a negative. If this is your first time learning about these, woah, crazy, right?

A complex number z is made by combining an “imaginary” number with a “real” number:

To make a Mandelbrot set, just run this function on all values of c, recursively:

To draw the set, we apply this function to every point (or, in our case, every pixel position) on the complex plane. This is c.

The result of step n is zₙ. The result of the next step is zₙ₊₁.

For every step, we square the result of the previous step, then add c.

Who ever said maths wasn’t fun?

Some numbers, like 0.1 + 0.1i, will stay small through iterations and never escape. These are in the Mandelbrot set.

Other values of c, like in the above example, will keep growing bigger and bigger as you square them, infinitely. These are not in the Mandelbrot set.

OK. Back to the shaders: our first iteration:

[[ stitchable ]]
half4 mandelbrot(float2 position, float4 bounds) {
    float2 c = (position - bounds.xy - bounds.zw * 0.5) / bounds.w * 4.0;
    float2 z = float2(0.0, 0.0);

    z = float2(
        z.x * z.x - z.y * z.y,
        2.0 * z.x * z.y
    ) + c;

    if (length(z) > 2.0) {
        return half4(1.0h, 1.0h, 1.0h, 1.0h);
    }

    return half4(0.0h, 0.0h, 0.0h, 1.0h);
}

First, we set up the values of c and z, with float2 used to represent complex numbers:

• z just starts as 0 (or, more specifically, 0 + 0i).

• c maps pixel positions to each complex number, scaled to the bounds:

  • We set up the real and imaginary components in a float2, using normalised coordinates along the rectangle’s bounds.

  • We take the pixel position, take away the bounds origin to get a relative offset, and take away half the bounds’ size to center our coordinates around “zero”.

  • Then we divide by the bounds’ height to scale from -0.5 to 0.5 vertically, then multiply by 4 to re-scale to -2 to +2.

Next, we perform our iteration: we compute z² + c. A simple mathematical relationship allows us to, functionally, ignore the imaginary-ness of the complex number:

This relationship allows us to compute the real component and the imaginary component of z as another simple float2.

Finally, we can apply another simple mathematical rule here: any complex number with length (magnitude) over 2 will escape to infinity, and so isn’t in the set, andwe return white. Any other complex number might be in the set and we return black.

But we might need a few more iterations to find out the truth.

5. Running a few iterations

Okay, I feel like I lost like 75% of you back there. Originally, the previous step was about six steps, but it made the article very, very boring. To keep momentum I just had to rip the band-aid off.

I promise it gets easier now. We’ll do some SwiftUI next. Scout’s honour.

So we’ve got a big black circle. Let’s see what happens to it when we do a few more iterations. Like I promised, this bit is really easy: We just take our existing calculation for z, and we loop over it six times.

[[ stitchable ]]
half4 mandelbrot(float2 position, float4 bounds) {
    float2 c = (position - bounds.xy - bounds.zw * 0.5) / bounds.w * 4.0;
    float2 z = float2(0.0, 0.0);

    for (int iteration = 0; iteration < 6; iteration++) {
        z = float2(
            z.x * z.x - z.y * z.y,
            2.0 * z.x * z.y
        ) + c;

        if (length(z) > 2.0) {
            return half4(1.0h, 1.0h, 1.0h, 1.0h);
        }
    }

    return half4(0.0h, 0.0h, 0.0h, 1.0h);
}

The one clever nuance here is thus: we can save quite a bit of computation per pixel by allowing early escapes: As soon as the length of z exceeds 2, we can stop iterating and return white, meaning “definitely not in the set”.

I can start to see something familiar take fractal… I mean, take shape. I’m pumped.

6. More and more (and more) iterations

This step isn’t strictly necessary: you can just whack a massive number onto the iteration limit and get it over with, but it’s also very interesting, so deal with it.

We can pass arguments into our shader function as well. Arguments that can even be determined by a user… let’s adjust our view a little.

import SwiftUI

struct MandelbrotView: View {
    @State private var iterationLimit = 256.0

    var body: some View {
        Rectangle()
            .fill(ShaderLibrary.mandelbrot(
                .boundingRect,
                .float(Float(iterationLimit))
            ))
            .ignoresSafeArea()
            .overlay(alignment: .topLeading) {
                iterationControls
            }
    }

    private var iterationControls: some View {
        VStack(alignment: .leading, spacing: 8) {
            Text("Iterations: \(Int(iterationLimit))")
                .font(.headline.monospacedDigit())

            Slider(value: $iterationLimit, in: 1...256, step: 1) {
                Text("Iterations")
            }
            .accessibilityValue(Text("\(Int(iterationLimit))"))
        }
        .padding(16)
        .frame(width: 240)
        .background(.regularMaterial, in: RoundedRectangle(cornerRadius: 16))
        .padding(20)
    }
}

I hope I don’t need to explain sliders to you in SwiftUI. The shader function too gets a fairly simple update.

[[ stitchable ]]
half4 mandelbrot(float2 position, float4 bounds, float iterationLimit) {
    float2 size = bounds.zw;
    float2 offset = position - bounds.xy - size * 0.5;
    float horizontalSpan = 5.5;
    float unitsPerPoint = horizontalSpan / size.x;
    float2 center = float2(-0.6, 0.0);

    float2 c = center + offset * unitsPerPoint;
    float2 z = float2(0.0, 0.0);

    for (int iteration = 0; iteration < int(iterationLimit); iteration++) {
        z = float2(
            z.x * z.x - z.y * z.y,
            2.0 * z.x * z.y
        ) + c;

        if (length(z) > 2.0) {
            return half4(1.0h, 1.0h, 1.0h, 1.0h);
        }
    }

    return half4(0.0h, 0.0h, 0.0h, 1.0h);
}

Let’s play with the slider now.

7. Colouring the escaping pixels

We now have something, to speak momentarily like Claude, undeniably Mandelbrot-shaped. But is it Mandelbrot coloured?

You may be curious: how is it that a set of numbers, either “in” or “not in”, is always coloured in such crazy ways in those trippy Mandelbrot zoom videos? It’s because we just need one more rule: colour a number based on how quickly it goes to infinity.

Drop the slider. That was mostly illustrative. Let’s hardcode 256 iterations for now. When we start zooming in (spoiler alert for step #10) we can adjust that as needed.

Take .float(Float(iterationLimit)) out of the SwiftUI call to ShaderLibrary.mandelbrot().

First let’s add a function that takes a number of iterations and outputs a half3 representing RGB values from 0 to 1.

half3 palette(int iterations) {
    float phase = 0.15 * float(iterations);
    return half3(
        0.5 + 0.5 * cos(phase + 4.0),
        0.5 + 0.5 * cos(phase + 2.0),
        0.5 + 0.5 * cos(phase)
    );
}

Long story short, cos(x) is some value from -1 to 1. So by taking 0.5 + 0.5 cos(x), we create a normalised value from 0 to 1 that maps to an RGB value. sin(x) works too, if that’s more your style.

Each RGB component is moved a little out of phase with the others (e.g. cos(phase + 4)), so as iterations increase, the return value goes from blueish, to reddish, to greenish, and back again.

The big win from a trigonometric function is that these keep repeating: the further you zoom into the fine structures at the “edges” of the Mandelbrot set, the more iterations something takes to escape to infinity. So the palette function works just the same no matter how far we zoom.

So the first 1-42 iterations go from blueish, to reddish, to greenish. But then once you zoom down to where it takes, say, 100,000 iterations to escape, the function still works: greenish, to blueish, to reddish. Forever.

[[ stitchable ]]
half4 mandelbrot(float2 position, float4 bounds) {
    float2 size = bounds.zw;
    float2 offset = position - bounds.xy - size * 0.5;
    float horizontalSpan = 5.5;
    float unitsPerPoint = horizontalSpan / size.x;
    float2 center = float2(-0.6, 0.0);
    float2 c = center + offset * unitsPerPoint;

    float2 z = float2(0.0, 0.0);
    const int maxIterations = 256;
    int iterations = 0;

    for (; iterations < maxIterations; iterations++) {
        z = float2(
            z.x * z.x - z.y * z.y,
            2.0 * z.x * z.y
        ) + c;

        if (length(z) > 2.0) {
            break;
        }
    }

    if (iterations == maxIterations) {
        return half4(0.0h, 0.0h, 0.0h, 1.0h);
    }

    return half4(palette(iterations), 1.0h);
}

Now we’ve locked the max iteration count to 256 to get a fine structure we can begin to zoom into. Here, we still break out early if we start to escape, but instead of painting pure white, we apply our new palette.

It’s… it’s beautiful.

Already, we can see the mathematics taking shape… quite literally, I guess.

Oh, also, as long as you get oscillation across each colour component, the numbers in the palette function are kind of arbitrary:

• We can tune the phase multiplier to get ‘faster’ colour oscillation,

• We can change the constant added in the cos function to find a different colour palette.

I prefer to space these out evenly, using multiples of M_PI_F. To get the neatest spacing, and therefore the most vibrant colour palette, I space the colours by 2π/3.

half3 palette(int iterations) {
    float phase = 0.30 * float(iterations);
    return half3(
        0.5 + 0.5 * cos(phase + 2.0 * M_PI_F / 3.0),
        0.5 + 0.5 * cos(phase),
        0.5 + 0.5 * cos(phase + 4.0 * M_PI_F / 3.0)
    );
}

You know what, everyone always gives blue outsides to their ‘brots.

This looks way better. Let’s keep it.

8. Giving SwiftUI a camera

What do we actually have left to do? We’ve got the entire mathematical formulation built, we just need to add the ability to 1) move around the fractal, and 2) move into the shape. Conceptually, this is effectively adding a videogame camera to the app, storing both a location and a zoom level.

The complicated shader work is over. The rest of our code doesn’t even touch the iteration loop or pixel colouring logic: in fact, everything else we’re looking at just affects the initial value of c.

To start building our camera, we just need to store the centre property and pass it to our shader. This allows us to map the viewport centre to a complex coordinate.

struct MandelbrotView: View {
    let center = CGPoint(x: -0.6, y: 0.0)

    var body: some View {
        Rectangle()
            .fill(ShaderLibrary.mandelbrot(
                .boundingRect,
                .float2(center)
            ))
            .ignoresSafeArea()
    }
}

This property is added to our Mandelbrot shader’s arguments, and used as the starting point for computing the initial value of c, that is, the complex number associated with a specific pixel position.

[[ stitchable ]]
half4 mandelbrot(
    float2 position,
    float4 bounds,
    float2 center
) {
    float2 size = bounds.zw;
    float2 offset = position - bounds.xy - size * 0.5;

    float horizontalSpan = 5.5;
    float unitsPerPoint = horizontalSpan / size.x;
    float2 c = center + offset * unitsPerPoint;

    float2 z = float2(0.0, 0.0);
    const int maxIterations = 256;
    int iterations = 0;

    for (; iterations < maxIterations; iterations++) {
        z = float2(
            z.x * z.x - z.y * z.y,
            2.0 * z.x * z.y
        ) + c;

        if (length(z) > 2.0) {
            break;
        }
    }

    if (iterations == maxIterations) {
        return half4(0.0h, 0.0h, 0.0h, 1.0h);
    }

    return half4(palette(iterations), 1.0h);
}

I’ll save you scrolling up, we’ve done something really simple: we’ve taken this one line out of the shader, and passed it through SwiftUI instead.

float2 center = float2(-0.6, 0.0);

And, the result is… nothing different from before. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

9. Dragging around the screen

We’re nearly there. One more until the big one. We just need to make the centre property mutable in SwiftUI by implementing a drag gesture.

struct MandelbrotView: View {
    @State private var center = CGPoint(x: -0.6, y: 0.0)
    @State private var currentCenter = CGPoint(x: -0.6, y: 0.0)
    @State private var viewWidth: CGFloat = 1000

    var body: some View {
        Rectangle()
            .fill(ShaderLibrary.mandelbrot(
                .boundingRect,
                .float2(center)
            ))
            .onGeometryChange(for: CGFloat.self, of: \.size.width) {
                viewWidth = $0
            }
            .gesture(
                DragGesture()
                    .onChanged { value in
                        let unitsPerPoint = 5.5 / viewWidth
                        center = CGPoint(
                            x: currentCenter.x - value.translation.width * unitsPerPoint,
                            y: currentCenter.y - value.translation.height * unitsPerPoint
                        )
                    }
                    .onEnded { _ in
                        currentCenter = center
                    }
            )
            .ignoresSafeArea()
    }
}

Hopefully nothing new here: we add a gesture, and update the centre property passed into the shader as it changes by taking away the (scaled) translation from the original center value.

We’re scaling the translation by dividing the horizontalSpan of 5.5 from before (the number line from -3.35 to 2.15), by the number of screen points, so we can scale the screen’s points to “units” on the number line.

I computed viewWidth, the number of points along the screen, using onGeometryChange because GeometryReader is a cesspit of snakes which I try to avoid at all costs 🐍.

Now we can start to dynamically shift the camera about with a finger.

Ok, you ready for the big finale? Things are about to get bonkers.

10. The Mandelbrot Zoom™

I saved the best to last. This is what a Mandelbrot app is all about. Victory lap. Cheers for sticking with it. To magnify our fractal, we need to create a pinch-to-zoom gesture, and pass the zoom level to our shader.

struct MandelbrotView: View {
    @State private var center = CGPoint(x: -0.6, y: 0.0)
    @State private var currentCenter = CGPoint(x: -0.6, y: 0.0)
    @State private var viewWidth: CGFloat = 1000
    @State private var horizontalSpan: CGFloat = 5.5
    @State private var currentSpan: CGFloat = 5.5

    var body: some View {
        Rectangle()
            .fill(ShaderLibrary.mandelbrot(
                .boundingRect,
                .float2(center),
                .float(Float(horizontalSpan))
            ))
            .onGeometryChange(for: CGFloat.self, of: \.size.width) {
                viewWidth = $0
            }
            .gesture(
                DragGesture()
                    .onChanged { value in
                        let unitsPerPoint = horizontalSpan / viewWidth
                        center = CGPoint(
                            x: currentCenter.x - value.translation.width * unitsPerPoint,
                            y: currentCenter.y - value.translation.height * unitsPerPoint
                        )
                    }
                    .onEnded { _ in
                        currentCenter = center
                    }
            )
            .simultaneousGesture(
                MagnifyGesture()
                    .onChanged { value in
                        horizontalSpan = min(max(currentSpan / value.magnification, 0.000_01), 5.5)
                    }
                    .onEnded { _ in
                        currentSpan = horizontalSpan
                    }
            )
            .ignoresSafeArea()
    }
}

Since the gesture is interactive, we need to store both a currentSpan to store the “original” value and horizontalSpan to track the “live” value during a pinch gesture, overwriting the original value onEnded. You can also handle this with @GestureState, but the code ended up way harder to follow. Our centre-point computation in the DragGesture now uses this dynamic span from magnification to calculate unitsPerPoint.

To implement the pinch gesture, we use the run-of-the-mill simultaneousGesture API to add an additional gesture to the view, MagnifyGesture, which tracks a magnification multiplier interactively. A magnification of 2 halves the visible horizontalSpan, zooming into the fractal.

This horizontalSpan property represents the length across the number line traversed by our camera’s zoom level. Again, none of the maths changes. All we’re doing is extracting our hardcoded horizontalSpan from before and making it an argument to our shader.

[[ stitchable ]]
half4 mandelbrot(
    float2 position,
    float4 bounds,
    float2 center,
    float horizontalSpan
) {
    float2 size = bounds.zw;
    float2 offset = position - bounds.xy - size * 0.5;

    float unitsPerPoint = horizontalSpan / size.x;
    float2 c = center + offset * unitsPerPoint;

    float2 z = float2(0.0, 0.0);
    const int maxIterations = 256;
    int iterations = 0;

    for (; iterations < maxIterations; iterations++) {
        z = float2(
            z.x * z.x - z.y * z.y,
            2.0 * z.x * z.y
        ) + c;

        if (length(z) > 2.0) {
            break;
        }
    }

    if (iterations == maxIterations) {
        return half4(0.0h, 0.0h, 0.0h, 1.0h);
    }

    return half4(palette(iterations), 1.0h);
}

We pin the horizontalSpan between 5.5 units (at max zoom-out) and 0.00001 (for max magnification). You’ll see why in a moment.

Totally mesmerising, until… I guess until it isn’t.

The end of the line

That minimum horizontalSpan across our number line is 0.00001 because, at this point, we run out of precision when performing recursive complex analysis with float32.

Once we zoom in far enough, with a tiny horizontalSpan, neighbouring pixels at this precision round out to the same complex number, giving us pixellated rectangular blocks at this limit.

This is the end of the line for the neat, code-golfed, 90-lines-total app we set up today. But for those willing to ask nicely for thousands more lines of code, we can try out some more computationally elaborate solutions.

There’s a mathematical trick called perturbation which allows us to zoom to arbitrary levels of precision without melting the GPU.

We can use representations other than float32 (Metal doesn’t have a float64, and if it did, that just kicks the can down the road). We instead store complex numbers as chunks using an array of numbers, allowing for arbitrary precision, and hand-roll* the resulting complex square maths. As we go deeper, we compute one ultra-high-precision “reference orbit” in the centre, and calculate other pixels on-screen as tiny deviations from this reference, which can be done drastically faster.

*“hand”-roll

I almost got through a whole article without mentioning UIKit

Naturally, I thought to myself “can UIKit can help polish our app?”.

We can actually replace the SwiftUI gestures with a UIScrollView to handle gestures like 1-finger pan, 2-finger pinch, the deceleration physics you know and love, as well as add a million free, invisible, optimisations like “protecting against accidental flings when a pinch ends” and “stopping an accidental pan when one finger in a pinch gesture lifts up first”.

Now, it was time to unplug my maths brain and plug in my product brain, and implement a number of neat quality-of-life features.

• The biggest win was separating gestures from drawing: this meant the main thread kept free to handle panning and zooming around the fractal, with perfectly smooth drawing on the GPU. Pan gestures translate the whole image we’ve drawn, and pinch gestures zoom into the existing painted pixels, rather than forcing each single pixel to re-compute immediately when the UIScrollView moves.

• Because the maths slows down the deeper we go, I computed pixels middle-out so you can keep zooming before all the maths finishes.

• I added pre-installed reference zooms, the ability to save and auto-zoom to new features of the fractal like the Elephant Valley or Seahorse Valley, and lots of colour palettes (some with new post-processing shaders on top of the view itself)

• I implemented automatic zooming, so a tap anywhere will automatically zoom towards a random edge in that direction, forever. This was huge because it made it possible for my kids to play with it. It worked with a tiny GPU readback to locate boundary details.

• This caused a lot of jitter between computed frames, so I set up a dynamic algorithm to learn, through each iteration, how quickly your GPU was processing everything, allowing for a smooth, auto-adjusting zoom velocity.

• I implemented caching for pre-installed and saved zooms, so a lot of the heavy maths was ready up-front, making subsequent zooms quicker. It took a bit of experimenting before I relegated work like GPU readbacks, compression, and disk writes to a background job to avoid it eating drawing cycles while a user was moving around.

• At some deep zooms, the fractal turned into noise because adjacent pixels had drastically different numbers of iterations before escaping. Instead of hardcoding integer iteration counts, I used the magnitude of z when it escaped as well as the integer iteration count, to compute much smoother gradations. I also applied a log to the number of iterations at deeper zooms to smooth out the speed of colour changes. See before this fix (top) and after (bottom).

You can actually apply this to the code-golfed version above with a 2-line change: adjust the shader to accept float iterations in palette() and apply logarithms to the argument.

half3 palette(float iterations) {
    float phase = 0.30 * iterations;
    return half3(
        0.5 + 0.5 * cos(phase + 2.0 * M_PI_F / 3.0),
        0.5 + 0.5 * cos(phase),
        0.5 + 0.5 * cos(phase + 4.0 * M_PI_F / 3.0)
    );
}

[[ stitchable ]]
half4 mandelbrot(
    float2 position,
    float4 bounds,
    float2 center,
    float horizontalSpan
) {
    float2 size = bounds.zw;
    float2 offset = position - bounds.xy - size * 0.5;

    float unitsPerPoint = horizontalSpan / size.x;
    float2 c = center + offset * unitsPerPoint;

    float2 z = float2(0.0, 0.0);
    const int maxIterations = 256;
    int iterations = 0;

    for (; iterations < maxIterations; iterations++) {
        z = float2(
            z.x * z.x - z.y * z.y,
            2.0 * z.x * z.y
        ) + c;

        if (length(z) > 2.0) {
            break;
        }
    }

    if (iterations == maxIterations) {
        return half4(0.0h, 0.0h, 0.0h, 1.0h);
    }

    return half4(palette(iterations + 1 - log2(log2(length(z)))), 1.0h);
}

• Having fully-loaded Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra-6.0 subscriptions helped me out tremendously. I could trivially request research into countless open-source Mandelbrot implementations to find maths optimisations I missed, perform adversarial reviews of my existing work, and study existing apps on the store to locate any features I forgot (such as pinch to rotate, whoops).

• I noticed that some store apps listed 10²⁰⁰⁰x zooms. If you’re doing the maths right, you can obviously go to arbitrary, infinite, levels of precision, but I stupidly only listed 10¹³⁸x. Not good enough! So, naturally, I researched more deep points-of-interest and now I market myself as 10¹⁰⁰⁰⁰x (or 10¹⁰ᵏ).

• Finally, the auto-zoom into random edges and previously-saved areas still felt a little janky to me, even with the smoothing algorithm. All our main-thread-saving optimisations with UIKit gestures and preventing redraws on the GPU made manual pinch-to-zoom feel much more performant. So I re-worked the auto-zooming implementation, kept the caching, but forced it to behave like the gesture-based manual zooming. And boy is it fast now.

Alright, I reckon we’re done here. Give it a look!

Download "Ultra Mandelbrot" here

Last Orders 🍺

This article has been on my agenda for years. I’ve got that special flavour of autism that makes the Mandelbrot set catnip to me. What do you mean that nobody in history has ever seen this edge before? There’s a certain romanticism to it.

The Mandelbrot set is the coolest thing in mathematics because it creates infinite complexity from an extremely simple rule: square and add c, recursively.

I hope you’ve enjoyed our romp through Metal shaders, from the basics of painting a pixel on your SwiftUI, to our initial Mandelbrot computation, to applying camera semantics to introduce pan and zoom gestures to explore the fractal.

I may or may not have gone a little overboard with the subsequent optimisations over the last few weekends, the code from which I will not darken the daylight by sharing. But you’re welcome to download the app!

Download "Ultra Mandelbrot" here

(The name Metal Mandelbrot was taken 🥲)

Sponsored Link

Is your mobile app under attack right now?

Discover why real-time threat monitoring is crucial to your cybersecurity posture through a simulated attack demo.

Join GuardSquare on Oct 20th to uncover why threat monitoring is essential to the complete, end-to-end protection of your mobile app.

Sign up here.

Thanks for reading Jacob’s Tech Tavern! 🍺

Sent from my iPhone

© 2026 Jacob Bartlett
Substack Inc., 548 Market Street PMB 72296
San Francisco, CA 94104