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Major gaming news at WWDC: Metal and New games

Wheel_D said:
Have you tried it yourself? On my system, the frame rate stays at a consistent, constant 60 FPS until the in-game monitor resolution is set above 3840 x 2160. The game simply doesn't seem to be accounting for monitor type or capabilities, so its default value is safe rather than optimal. It's probably an oversight, one the developers could potentially fix in a subsequent update.
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On Mac I only play on my builtin screen. So the resolution is already set for upscaling to panel native for me. All the settings are "medium" for my box and it get 60fps with MetalFX DRS. It looks fine on the screen.
 
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It’s not 10k users. If you follow the link it says 100,000 and yes, many pirate it so there are even more users.

https://www.codeweavers.com/100kgiveaway

"Open to folks 18+ in the U.S. and anywhere else that hasn’t banned joy. No purchase necessary, no blood oath required. Winners picked at random and notified by August 4, 2025. Enter before Thursday, July 31, 2025 at 12:00 PM CDT / 5:00 PM UTC / 6:00 PM BST / 7:00 PM CEST / 10:00 AM PDT."

Skärmavbild 2025-07-29 kl. 17.27.18.png
 
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saldin said:
I kind of expected the new frame generation MetalFX feature would be restricted to the latest and greatest M chips, but it's instead supported by all; only MetalFX denoised upscaling is supported by M3 and M4 exclusively.

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That makes sense. The denoising is specifically for ray tracing (equivalent to Ray Reconstruction). The frame generation is probably similar to what AMD is doing with theirs (but maybe this one uses ANE?).
 
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diamond.g said:
That makes sense. The denoising is specifically for ray tracing (equivalent to Ray Reconstruction). The frame generation is probably similar to what AMD is doing with theirs (but maybe this one uses ANE?).
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I believe you’re right. I was thinking MetalFX frame generation to be something similar to nVidia’s AI-assisted in-hardware DLSS, and it may be something like AMD’s in-software FSR.

I’m wondering how powerful Apple’s NPUs really are, as I’m just reading a blog post about Firecore’s Infuse mentioning the A15 Bionic on the Apple TV 4K can only do limited in-hardware AI upscaling (https://firecore.com/blog/infuse-82-summer-love). And that’s the same NPU that’s on the M2. I’m aware it’s not the same, as MetalFX is geared towards 3D gaming where the upscaler would have additional information about a scene, like movement vectors, than it would have with a movie’s stream of still images.
 
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saldin said:
I believe you’re right. I was thinking MetalFX frame generation to be something similar to nVidia’s AI-assisted in-hardware DLSS, and it may be something like AMD’s in-software FSR.
Click to expand...

MetalFX does use the Neural Engine, so in a sense it is more like DLSS rather than FSR, which as you said is a software solution. If you use a tool like Powermetrics or one of the many wrappers for it, you can see ANE usage when playing a game that uses MetalFX. It’s pretty small. Around 5-10% in my experience.

saldin said:
I’m wondering how powerful Apple’s NPUs really are, as I’m just reading a blog post about Firecore’s Infuse mentioning the A15 Bionic on the Apple TV 4K can only do limited in-hardware AI upscaling (https://firecore.com/blog/infuse-82-summer-love). And that’s the same NPU that’s on the M2. I’m aware it’s not the same, as MetalFX is geared towards 3D gaming where the upscaler would have additional information about a scene, like movement vectors, than it would have with a movie’s stream of still images.
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Apple Silicon Mac's are definitely powerful enough for upscaling, whether that be gaming or video. I am not sure what Infuse does in terms of it’s AI upscaling, but this WWDC Apple announced their own easy to use video upscaling and frame interpolation, which runs on all Apple Silicon Macs.

developer.apple.com

Enhance your app with machine-learning-based video effects - WWDC25 - Videos - Apple Developer

Discover how to add effects like frame rate conversion, super resolution, and noise filtering to improve video editing and live streaming...
developer.apple.com developer.apple.com

There are other apps which predate this years WWDC which use MetalFX for video upscaling. The one that springs to mind is “Unsqueeze” by Finn Vorhees
apps.apple.com

‎Unsqueeze

‎Unsqueeze increases the resolution of your videos while preserving sharpness and details. Powered by Metal on Apple Silicon, Unsqueeze uses the latest and greatest upscaling algorithms, and runs entirely on the GPU, making higher quality videos faster than other upscaling software. Key...
apps.apple.com apps.apple.com

I found it a nice balance between performance and quality. There are other much more intensive upscalers like those from Topaz AI which do a better job but take hours or sometimes days. This one is much faster than real time.
 
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Dracomaton for Apple Silicon is free on Steam.

store.steampowered.com

Save 100% on DRACOMATON on Steam

Dracomaton is a top-down roguelike bullet hell about Eclipse, a small robot who awakens in an abandoned factory filled with corrupted training bots and the secrets of cosmic dragons. Fight your way to the top of the tower by transforming your robot body, changing your entire arsenal on the fly!
store.steampowered.com store.steampowered.com
 
Those game look a bit "adult" in terms of content, something that is not something I'd support. I see postal2 is probably the only thing that doesn't really have explicit content, and that I'm sure is gory as anything. I remember the original going postal game and the controversy that it caused.
 
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