Apple has announced its own gaming PC upscaler, and it could compete with Nvidia DLSS while releasing before Intel XeSS. Dubbed MetalFX, the tech will work alongside the company’s Metal 3 graphics API, a new toolkit that aims to improve the experience of playing games using a Mac.
Unveiled at the company’s WWDC event, Apple says its take on DLSS upscaling will enable game developers to “render rich, visually complex scenes even faster.” The tech also wields a ‘fast resource loading API’ that enables the GPU to directly fetch high-quality textures and buffers.
No Man’s Sky and Resident Evil Village are set to be the first games to support MetalFX, and Apple’s senior director of GPU software, Jeremy Sandmel, claims it’s a “new day for gaming on the Mac.” While that may be the case, we’ll need to see how many releases actually make it to macOS in the future and whether they’re able to flourish on the Metal 3 framework.
Apple hasn’t supplied a solid release date for MetalFX, but there’s a chance it could beat Intel XeSS to the punch. The blue team’s upscaling solution was supposed to arrive alongside the action RPG Dolmen on May 20, but the support for the tech was seemingly dropped without explanation (via Videocardz).
Both Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR are already helping the best graphics cards achieve new heights by balancing performance and fidelity. Yet, Macbooks armed with MetalFX could help Apple break into the gaming laptop scene, inevitably leaving Intel with a smaller chunk of the mobile market pie to feast upon.
