Metal 4: Two new features that will make a difference for Mac gaming

Apple’s relationship with gaming on the Mac has always been… interesting. While the company has spent a fortune trying to frame the Mac as a proper gaming machine, gamers have yet to embrace it like Apple had hoped. But with Metal 4, announced at WWDC25, Apple is introducing two practical moves that could help more AAA games run even better on the Mac. Here’s what they are.

But first, upscaling

Before we get into the new stuff, it’s worth a quick crack at how Apple’s MetalFX upscaling works, because both of these new features build on top of it.

Here’s the basic idea, as explained by Apple:

Rendering high resolution images can consume the GPU for a significant period of time. Instead, your app can render low resolution images and use MetalFX to upscale them. The combined time to render your final image is reduced and that means your app can save time for each frame it renders. You can use the time saved to render the next frame sooner.

This technique is not new, and while it doesn’t magically turn a MacBook Air into a gaming rig, it does help developers squeeze out better frame rates without sacrificing too much visual quality.

Upscaling is now pretty much the baseline for performance-conscious game development on Mac. And that’s exactly where interpolation and denoising come in.

If you’ve ever toggled on “frame generation” in PC games (or, if you’re like me, you roll your eyes at motion smoothing on a TV), you already know the concept.

Instead of making the GPU work overtime to render more frames per second, interpolation generates new frames in between real ones. It does this by analyzing motion vectors and depth data from your game to figure out how objects are moving between frames.

Here’s Apple:

This year, MetalFX adds support for frame interpolation. Your app can use it to generate intermediate frames in much less time than it would take to render each frame from scratch. You can use those intermediate frames to achieve even higher frame rates.

For players, that means smoother animations and a higher perceived frame rate, even if the game itself is only rendering, say, 30 or 60 frames per second. For developers, it’s a way to deliver a 90Hz or 120Hz experience without fully doubling the rendering workload.

MetalFX Denoised Upscaler

Ray tracing is currently a widely used graphics rendering technique in PC and console gaming. But it’s also notoriously performance-heavy. The more rays you cast to simulate realistic lighting and reflections, the prettier the scene looks, but the slower the frame rate.

With MetalFX’s new denoising feature, Apple’s pipeline now lets games render with fewer rays and then clean up the noisy, speckled result. The denoising happens during the upscaling process, meaning you get a smoother, noise-free image without needing to write custom denoising code or do heavy CPU-side processing.

Metal 4 will run on M! And later, and A14 Bionic and later as part of the Metal framework. To learn more about with, I suggest watching the Discover Metal 4 and Go further with Metal 4 games WWDC25 sessions.