Resident Evil Village on Mac Review: MetalFX Upscaling Challenges DLSS!

Resident Evil Village on Mac is an interesting release, specifically targeting Apple Silicon - so how does it play on M1 Max and M1 Ultra hardware? It turns out that this is actually a rather pedestrian story - though it seems that the #StutterStruggle affects Mac too - the big news here is how good Apple's MetalFX Upscaling actually is, comparable to DLSS in fact.

[Taijifufu]

It's strange that TAA would still be broken on Village when they actually fixed it for RE7, RE2, and RE3 last month. In any case MetalFX Quality seems very impressive.

[Zveebo]

This is a lot more impressive for MetalFX than I was expecting tbh – hope to see DF cover more of these releases. It would be interesting to see this on lower powered M1/M2 Macs as well.

[mejohnc]

This is great news for the Mac. With 50% of macs on steam running apple silicon, and if MetalFX get wide adoption, at worst you have an Xbox series s level of performance in every new MacBook. Let’s hope apple doesn’t let this opportunity pass by. Thank you for looking at this! I was not expecting this coverage.

We need to see more performance range than just the higher end Macs I presume you have for video editing. How about baseline M1 and M1 Pro?

[blendernoob]

Even though I play games on PC, I grew up on Mac and use it for work, and seeing Apple start to embrace games more on Mac is really cool. I hope though we get an id Tech game like Wolfenstein or Doom on Mac one day.

[tobimoriYT]

The biggest issue with this release is it being Mac App Store exclusive imho

[BrianJones-wkcx]

Appreciate the work, as usual, Oliver. Very interesting nod to the implications for mobile near the end—great insight. Disappointing that this port didn’t give us more to dig into, but looking forward to future opportunities to revisit the question of how Apple Silicon may (or may not) alter the state of Mac gaming.

[JebesNikove]

Man I really wish DF started using timestamps in all their videos :/

[MLWJ]

The mac community apparently doesn't do MetalFX justice, all of them used the performance mode & noted "it's amazing", so I'd already written it off as a very poor spatial upscaler. Little did I know that the Quality setting that they didn't even use or showcase is actually pretty darn good!

[theusualuspect]

I’m curious about power draw, could a comparison be made against console and PC hardware? Apple claim a significant power efficiency advantage but I’ve not seen anyone test it in any detail.

[infinitysynthesis]

I hope you do a video on the newest Cyberpunk update on the Series X with FSR 2.0

[zZiLyRj]

MetalFX, FSR, XeSS, and DLSS, all great technologies. Now we can get almost native visual with twice the performance. The future looks good for gaming, hopefully these technologies will get more improvements in the future.

[rg]

I’ve been playing through the game on my MacBook M1 max at 3426x2160 60fps with maximum settings and I gotta say it runs like a dream! It’s crazy how well it’s running on such a low power machine. On air with roughly 95-97% gpu usage, the gpu cores hit 68°C with 45% fan rpm (2900rpm). At that fan speed it’s still quite hard to hear the fans spinning up. I never expected to run games on my MacBook but it’s really cool what they’re trying to do, hopefully they can get more developers on board.

[kamalr]

I know we are a niche audience, but I have been a Mac + console gamer for 30 years and I really appreciate this coverage! I will always opt to play games like RE on console, but I am excited for the possibility of decently upscaled strategy games with native, retina-sharp text and UI that do justice to Apple's fantastic displays.

[daniebello]

definitely hope to see more DF videos of AAA games on Apple Silicon

[FelipeRRM]

Nice! Always good to see more competent upscaling implementation.
Just wondering why they do not allow to set the internal rendering resolution though. Rendering at 1440p would improve a lot the ghosting and artefacts showed in the video.

[alexandersokolov]

Nice, it’s good to have coverage for new Mac hardware. Hopefully there will be more AAA games there in near future.

[Girvo]

This is super impressive by Apple to be honest. Not really their wheelhouse, but they’ve done a good job!

[Iwaslemon]

I appreciate this video being made. As someone who prefers macOS for day to day computing tasks over Windows. It's always been annoying about the lack of native gaming options available. (There's some great work arounds in the macOS community). Some games I like to play just don't make it console, so if macs can be a viable alternative to windows. Then I'm down for some mac gaming

[ExcelsiorTech]

Crazy to think that this performance is from an APU and not a discrete GPU!