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: 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.MetalFX frame interpolation 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: 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. You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day.
Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop.Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel
