iOS 8 will support Frostbite and Unreal Engine 4 powered games

If you're interested in digging a bit deeper than our round-up of the new features announced for iOS 8, you've come to the right place.

Apple's senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi took to the stage in San Francisco to announce that iOS 8 will be a beefy gaming powerhouse thanks to the addition of Metal.

More than just a building material, Metal is a new technology coming in iOS 8 designed to increase the efficiency of iOS gaming.

Metal brings a 10-fold increase to an A7 device's graphic rendering efficiency - which means that high-end games will look even more amazing on your iPhone 5s, iPad Air, and/or second-generation iPad mini.

As Federighi spoke about Metal, a slide on the stage behind him touted support for Crytek, Unity, Electronic Arts, and Epic Games.

He then showed off a demo of Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare running on the console engine of EA's Frostbite game engine which was pushing out a reported 1.3 million triangles.

We feel compelled to tell you that 1.3 million is a whole lot of triangles.

Shortly after the PvZ demo, Epic Games' Tim Sweeney came on stage to show a demo of Zen Garden - at atmospheric app built in Unreal Engine 4.

Those eager to see what Zen Garden and UE 4 games will look like on their iOS devices can download Zen Garden for free when it launches alongside iOS 8 this fall.

It's worth noting that Epic did something similar way back in 2010 with the release of Epic Citadel, a tech demo designed to show how Unreal Engine 3 games would run on iOS devices.