At this year's WWDC, Apple announced a surprising new system coming to its Metal 3 gaming API that may sound familiar to PC gamers: MetalFX Upscaling.
The system will leverage Apple's custom silicon to reconstruct video game graphics using lower-resolution source images so that games can run more efficiently at lower resolutions while looking higher-res. This "temporal reconstruction" system sounds similar to existing offerings from AMD (
FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0) and Nvidia (Deep Learning Super-Sampling), along with an upcoming "
XeSS" system from Intel.
Based on how the system is described, it will more closely resemble AMD's system, since Apple has yet to announce a way for MetalFX Upscaling to leverage its custom-made "Neural Engine" system.
Apple has previously spoken at length to Ars Technica about machine learning models used to drive its custom silicon, but today's Metal 3 API news didn't include any such mentions, leaving
Nvidia's RTX series of graphics cards in the lead in that department.
By announcing this functionality for some of the world's most popular processors, Apple is arguably letting more game developers build their games and engines with image reconstruction—even if MetalFX Upscaling isn't open source, unlike AMD's FSR 2.0 system. Still, these image reconstruction systems typically have temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) in common. So long as game devs keep that kind of anti-aliasing in mind with their games and engines, they'll be more likely to take advantage and thus run more efficiently on a wide range of consoles, computers, and smartphones.
Metal 3 will also include a new "resource-loading" API designed to streamline asset-loading processes in video games, which currently sounds similar to Microsoft's DirectStorage system to optimize visually intensive IO processes that might otherwise be bottlenecked by traditional protocols.
To celebrate this Metal 3 API milestone, Apple confirmed that popular and processing-intensive games
Resident Evil Village and
No Man's Sky will come to macOS "later this year." Apple also says the same Metal 3 API benefits will land in iPadOS 16 this year.
arstechnica.com
