In a keynote video uploaded to YouTube, Apple discussed a number of new pieces of inbound hardware and software. Among these was the introduction of the Metal 3 graphics API, which comes with MetalFX Upscaling. Graphical upscaling has become an industry standard these days, with the technology aiming to improve the quality of games. Senior Director of GPU Software, Jeremy Sandmel, says that Metal 3 will also help improve load times by providing a more “direct path” between the system’s storage and memory.

RELATED: Intel Arc GPU for Laptops Has Launched, But XeSS Upscaling Is Not Available Yet

Sandmel goes on to say that two games will be the first to receive MetalFX: the BAFTA award winning No Man’s Sky and Resident Evil Village. In a nutshell, image upscaling is an AI-driven piece of software that works by redrawing the pixels on-screen to a higher resolution without additional work from the hardware. For example, it can take a game running at 1080p and redraw the visuals to increase the resolution to 1440p. The idea behind this is that it gives greater visual fidelity as though the game is running on a higher resolution natively. In the video below, the speech on MetalFX begins at around 1:22:00.

If this all sounds familiar, it may be because both Nvidia and AMD have their own versions of this. The former has DLSS or Deep Learning Super Sampling that is compatible with many games, while the latter has FSR or FidelityFX Super Resolution. Both of them work in a similar way except, currently, Nvidia’s is only compatible with its own RTX graphics cards, while AMD’s is more open-source. Intel is also due to release its own upscaling AI, called Xess or Xe Super Sampling, most likely when it finally unleashes its Arc desktop GPUs.

At the moment, there doesn’t appear to be a release date for MetalFX, but with AMD just launching FSR 2.0 and Intel about to join the race, there’s every reason to believe that Apple won’t be far behind. It will be interesting to see how it fares against the other two, but for anyone who plays games on a Mac, this could be one to look out for.

MORE: Apple’s Rumored Game Console Would Have a Big Hill to Climb

Source: PCGamesN