Digital Foundry gets to grips with the Apple Silicon port of Resident Evil Village for Mac. The conversion itself has issues but the real surprise is Apple's MetalFX upscaling - which is comparable to Nvidia's DLSS.
Most Mac game ports are pretty simple: take an existing Windows title, run it through a compatibility layer like Wine, make some UI tweaks and you're most of the way to a half-decent Mac version. This approach often leads to performance and stability issues, but it's a reasonably easy way to convert a popular game to MacOS. However, with the advent of Apple Silicon - Apple's custom ARM-based Mac SoCs - we're starting to see a different approach.
So what's the catch? MetalFX Quality tends to struggle somewhat with transparencies. DLSS and FSR2 can also exhibit some issues with transparent elements and we see the same issues here. Similarly, vegetation - which likely lacks the motion vector inputs these scalers thrive upon - also has issues, with obvious ghosting. At regular viewing distances it doesn't look too bad, but it's definitely noticeable and is a substantial step down from native rendering.
Image quality is just half the battle with upsampling, of course, so how do the MetalFX options scale in terms of performance? Unfortunately, testing Resident Evil Village presents some significant issues. The game is so light on GPU resources without ray tracing that both of my Apple Silicon Macs - a M1 Max-based MacBook Pro and an M1 Ultra-based Mac Studio - hit 4K60 fairly easily with any upsampling option enabled.
Outside of those issues, and the swapping of the FSR1 option for MetalFX, the settings options are the same. There's still an option for checkerboard rendering and curiously AMD's other custom tech, including options for contrast-adaptive sharpening and CACAO ambient occlusion, are still present and seem to be working. Measured up against the PC version with the same settings, the Mac release looks more or less identical.
As you actually start playing the game, however, you'll probably notice issues with periodic stutters. Yes, it seems like the infamous #StutterStruggle with shader compilation is indeed an issue with this game on Mac. My initial playthrough of this section on Mac Studio at 1080p is a stuttering mess, for instance, with frequent and obtrusive stutter.
Outside of the shader compilation issues performance seems reasonable, but pretty unexceptional on the whole. My MacBook Pro is typically in the 30-40fps range at native 4K here, while the Mac Studio is usually at 50fps or above. A Windows laptop with a 3080M clocks in with pretty similar performance to the Mac Studio. You would probably expect slightly better performance here on the Mac side, but it's not wildly out-of-line with Windows performance with comparable graphics hardware.
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