Apple’s MetalFX Scaling Technology: Designed Based on AMD FSR for a High-End User Experience

With each new generation of consoles, video games are released with better graphics and higher requirements to run them smoothly. Upgrading the graphics card or processor of a computer to play these titles at 60 FPS or higher is quite costly, considering the current hardware prices. Fortunately, there are upscaling technologies like AMD FSR that enable older graphics cards to achieve higher FPS. It has now been revealed that Apple’s MetalFX Upscaling technology is based on AMD FSR.

The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles were launched more than three years ago, and since then, games have been released that have stirred controversy due to poor optimization or high requirements. We have seen GPUs with 8 GB of VRAM or less struggle to play some titles at ultra settings, even at Full HD resolution. Lowering the graphics settings is always an option, but reducing the native resolution ultimately results in a visually blurry game with higher aliasing. Luckily, technologies like NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, Intel XeSS, and Apple’s MetalFX Upscaling allow us to achieve higher FPS with minimal quality loss.

Apple designed MetalFX Upscaling based on AMD FSR technology

Using these technologies in their Quality or Balanced modes, we can maintain a similar native quality with a significant FPS improvement in all games. Performance or Ultra Performance modes are generally not recommended unless specific exceptions are needed, such as the highest possible FPS or playing at very high resolution. Among all the upscaling technologies, we will discuss MetalFX Upscaling today, which was announced in the summer of 2022 as Apple’s new solution for playing triple-A games on their devices.

With this technology, better performance can be achieved, and when combined with the latest generation chips and more powerful GPUs, many titles can be played quite decently. Although Apple initially considered MetalFX Upscaling as its technology, it is now based on AMD’s open-source alternative, FSR.

We might see frame generation comparable to FSR 3

Considering that AMD recently published the source code for FSR 3 and earlier versions, effectively making them open source, it made sense for Apple to take advantage of this opportunity instead of starting from scratch. Being based on FSR does not mean it is a direct copy; instead, they will modify it to differentiate themselves from others, possibly even improving upon AMD.

Thanks to MetalFX Upscaling, it is possible to play games like Resident Evil Village on Mac and even the iPhone 15, which is quite surprising. Apple must have used an older version of FSR, as MetalFX Upscaling development began some time ago. Now that we know that AMD has released the open-source FSR 3, we might see a version with frame generation from MetalFX Upscaling.

The article on Apple’s MetalFX Upscaling technology being designed based on AMD FSR was first published on El Chapuzas Informático.