MetalFX Upscaling Tech Is Apple’s Answer to NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS

During WWDC 2022, Apple had quite a few surprises for gamers, chiefly the MetalFX upscaling technology part of the updated Metal 3 API. Similar to upscaling technologies like NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling, AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, and Intel’s upcoming Xe Super Sampling, it will allow improved frame rates at high resolution.

Interestingly, the MetalFX developer documentation reveals that the upscaling technology supports both temporal antialiased upscaling (such as in DLSS, FSR 2.0, and XeSS) and spatial upscaling (such as in FSR 1.0).

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The MetalFX framework integrates with Metal to upscale a relatively low-resolution image to a higher output resolution in less time than it takes to render directly to the output resolution. Use the GPU time savings to further enhance your app or game’s experience. For example, add more effects or scene details.

MetalFX gives you two different ways to upscale your input renderings:

• Temporal antialiased upscaling
• Spatial upscaling

During the WWDC 2022 presentation, Senior Director of GPU Software Jeremy Sandmel revealed that No Man’s Sky (coming to iPad and Mac later this year) will be one of the first games to take advantage of MetalFX.

Another is Capcom’s Resident Evil Village, also scheduled to launch later this year on Mac. Masaru Ijuin, manager of Capcom’s Advanced Technical Research Division, said:

It’s with great pleasure that we’re bringing our latest Resident Evil installment to Apple’s amazing Mac lineup, powered by Apple silicon. With its incredible performance, now the Mac with Apple silicon is a great platform for games. And with our support for new Metal 3, our game screams on Apple Silicon from the MacBook Air to the blazing-fast Mac Studio.

[…] With MetalFX Upscaling, we’re able to render amazing high-resolution visuals across the entire line, with MacBook Air running effortlessly at 1080p and Mac Studio delivering a breathtaking 4K experience. Previously, this was only possible with high-performance consoles and gaming PCs, but we’re now able to bring this to every mac with Apple silicon.

Besides MetalFX upscaling, Apple also added the following features to the Metal 3 API for games.

Fast resource loading

Optimally stream asset data to Metal textures and buffers directly from storage using asynchronous I/O.

Offline shader compilation

The compiler can generate GPU binaries at project build time to eliminate in-app shader compilation, helping games improve performance and reduce load times..

Mesh shaders

This new geometry pipeline replaces vertex shaders with two new shader stages — object and mesh — that enable more flexible culling and LOD selection, and more efficient geometry shading and generation.

Metal backend for PyTorch

The new Metal backend in PyTorch version 1.12 enables high-performance, GPU-accelerated training using MPS Graph and the Metal Performance Shaders primitives.