Apple’s new MetalFX Upscaling system will compete with AMD FSR, Nvidia DLSS

Enlarge / MetalFX Upscaling, as visually described by Apple at WWDC 2022. (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—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 M1 and M2 silicon do not include dedicated AI processing cores like Nvidia's RTX series of graphics cards.

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.

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