Gaming features continue to be added for Apple Silicon Macs, especially those that will eventually be updated to macOS Tahoe 26, with the company announcing the new Metal 4 API during its WWDC 2025 keynote. While the Cupertino behemoth did not dive into extensive details on what to expect for future games, additions like MetalFX Frame Interpolation and Denoising have been added to boost performance and make visually appealing features like ray tracing and path tracing possible without gimping the framerate. A new Game Porting Toolkit 3 has also been updated.
MetalFX upscaling was already present to boost gaming performance with a minimal impact on image quality, but the Metal API will take things to the next stage
Similar to NVIDIA’s Frame Generation, MetalFX’s Frame Interpolation generates an extra frame for every two input frames to increase framerate while introducing minimum computing overhead, but at the cost of input lag. To minimize input lag, the base framerate at which the game is currently running will need to be high, or users will be able to tell the ‘day and night’ difference. Apple Silicon chipsets have improved considerably in graphics performance, but they continue to lag behind NVIDIA’s and AMD’s chips.
MetalFX upscaling and frame interpolation will help to boost performance, but Apple has not summarized on how it plans to deal with that dreaded input lag. Alongside the aforementioned feature, the Denoising technology can finally bring ported games to the same image quality as PC titles, thanks to ray tracing and path tracing support. Since the M3 and newer have hardware-accelerated ray tracing support, it is only a matter of time before developers start implementing these changes to their titles.
As for the Game Porting Toolkit 3, developers can now understand how well their port is running by using certain software. The Metal Performance HUD can now be customized, with onscreen metrics providing real-time data on where those developers need to make optimizations. At the end of the day, these tools and improvements exist to deliver the best performance to gamers, and it is refreshing to see that every year, Apple has something notable to offer that will bring more and more gamers to its macOS platform, even if it means having to spend a premium.
