Apple is making another push to improve gaming on the Mac. At WWDC25, the company introduced Metal 4, its latest graphics framework, with two key features aimed at making games look and run better: frame interpolation and denoised upscaling.
Both features build on Apple’s existing MetalFX upscaling. This technology lets games render at lower resolutions and then upscale the image to save processing time, boosting performance without a big hit to visual quality.
The first new feature is MetalFX Frame Interpolation. Instead of the GPU rendering every single frame, interpolation creates new frames between the real ones by analyzing motion in the game. This results in smoother animations and a higher perceived frame rate, without fully overloading the GPU. Players can get a 90Hz or 120Hz experience, even if the game is only rendering at 30 or 60 frames per second.
The second feature is the MetalFX Denoised Upscaler. This is especially useful for ray-traced graphics, which look great but are usually very demanding on hardware. With denoising, games can use fewer rays for rendering, and then automatically clean up the noisy result during the upscaling process. This saves time and improves performance while still delivering sharp, realistic visuals.
Metal 4 supports Macs with M1 chips and later and iPhones with A14 Bionic and newer. Apple hopes these upgrades will help more AAA games run smoothly on Macs and make the platform more attractive to developers and players alike.
