Apple Unveils MetalFX Frame Interpolation, Hops On AI Game Rendering Bandwagon

Apple's MetalFX Upscaling improvements are driven by machine learning data that the company says it has been refining since the initial introduction in 2022. Now there's also support for dynamic resolution so that devs don't have to necessarily feed the same input data into the upscaler to get the final result. This base upscaling is applied early in the rendering pipeline, just after the jittered render and before the post-processing effects. Artists can offer hints to the API about the characteristics of particle effects, that otherwise tend to blend into the background or objects too much, as shown by early implementations of FSR and DLSS.

Regarding the MetalFX Frame Interpolation, it's applied at the end of the rendering pipeline, just before the final output display. The developers can provide the API with camera parameters and the time elapsed between two real frames so that MetalFX can better calculate the interpolated one. Along with other minor improvements, by our own Ben Funk's guesstimate, this should put the feature roughly on par with AMD's FSR 3 FG, at least as design goals go.

All told, these improvements should be very welcome for developers looking to port their games to a potentially very large, lucrative market. Although both desktop and laptop Macs still carry relatively weak GPUs, the generational performance uplift of Apple's M-series chips has been quite impressive, with the ability to play even some graphically-intensive titles at 1080p with judicious quality settings. Making life easier for developers with the Metal 4 API can only bring good things.