After DLSS, FSR and XeSS, here is MetalFX, Apple’s upscaling technology

Rich in beautiful announcements, the WWDC 2022 was also so for the players on Mac including MetalFX.

Apple thus intends to take advantage of its new and powerful M2 chip to catch up on the gaming market. The Apple company is taking the opportunity to enter the upscaling race by following in the footsteps of NVIDIA’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR and Intel’s XeSS.

Metal Upscaling

An integral part of the newly updated Metal 3 API, MetalFX was briefly presented during WWDC 2022 before being further detailed via developer documentation, cited in source below.

MetalFX is thus grafted onto the eponymous API to offer an over-sampling of a low definition image towards a higher definition, while limiting the loss of quality of such a process.

Rightly inspired by competing technologies, MetalFX will offer on Mac both the temporal antialized upsampling used by DLSS, FSR 2.0 and XeSS, but also the spatial upsampling used by the first version of the proprietary technology of AMD.

To inaugurate this Apple-branded technology, we learned during WWDC 2022 that No Man’s Sky (expected on both Mac and iPad this year) will fly to the Apple galaxy, boosted by MetalFX. Another juggernaut will also infect the Mac this year: none other than Resident Evil Villagealso with MetalFX support.

Mac gaming is gaining momentum

In addition to MetalFX, the Metal 3 API update was also an opportunity for Apple to improve the overall gaming experience on its devices. Many features are thus introduced.

These include faster resource loading, offline shader compilation, better optimized shader generation and a backend for PyTorch 1.12.

To sum up, this makes it possible to drastically reduce loading times and significantly improve performance, while taxing less the various components used.

Here is a rather encouraging advance from Apple in the gaming segment. We hope that the Cupertino company will continue its momentum so that players who are Mac fans can better enjoy their passion.

Source : Apple