The Digital Foundry review was illuminating as expected.
While their analysis confirms a lot of what I initially observed (quality mode is a temporal upscale achieving near native quality with a >50% performance uplift, performance mode is basically unusable), I found several things quite surprising:
1. Quality mode is achieved with a 4x upscale! That the quality is able to rival (and in some cases exceed) native 4K with a 1080P internal resolution is quite impressive indeed. I had assumed they were working with an internal res of at least around 1440P to get a result like this.
2. Disocclusion seems to be handled well (at least in this game), which is great news as this is something FSR 2.x can struggle with, but transparencies and hair need (a lot) of work vs the competition. Overall it seems comparable in quality to similar techniques (DLSS, FSR, XeSS) aside from the aforementioned weakness but as DF said, more datapoints (games) are needed.
3. The performance uplift for a 4x upscale is a little bit less impressive than one might expect. It seems like MetalFX Temporal Upscaling, at least in its current implantation has a significant frame time cost.
4. Performance mode is using the spatial upscaler (🤢). All the image breakup had me thinking it was just a really bad/low res temporal upscale but nope. This explains the poor quality (especially rendering from 1/4 res.) I honestly don't see the point of this when the Apple's temporal upscaler can achieve such great results at 4x. Even a 5-6x scale should give better results than this, and its already blown it out of the water by just quality mode at lower resolution.
6. The resolution issues people were speculating about (saying Mac 4K doesn't match PC 4K) didn't merit a mention in DF's video. While I'm not saying that's definitive proof it's a non issue, I think given that DF pixel counted a wide variety of scenes, I'm inclined to believe that if there is a difference in image quality it's likely related to the way the game is rendered on macOS (perhaps Metal is missing a feature, implements something in a way which impacts the final result) and not the actual number of pixels the Mac version is rendering. IMHO, it doesn't seem to be a big deal.
Overall a VERY strong first showing for MetalFX's temporal upscaler, and a real boon for Apple Silicon gaming.
The port itself is, as they note, less impressive (albeit serviceable). Performance isn't in line with what we'd expect given the GPU power available and shader compilation stutter is unfortunately still present (just like the PC version) despite Apple offering API's to avoid this :/
I think the main question now is how committed Apple is to continuing to develop and improve MetalFX. DLSS and FSR are constantly improving and have made huge strides in perceptual resolution, dealing with transparencies, disocclusion, fine detail (hair, fences, wires.) MetalFX Temporal Upscaling is an excellent first effort, but if left to rot will quickly become less impressive compared to the competition.
The future looks like it could be bright. I'm excited to see how No Man's Sky and RE Village Gold Edition DLC (Shadows of Rose, 3rd person mode, etc) hold up.
