

And if your image includes information like flight info or tracking numbers, you’ll be able to click those things to get more information, the same way you can in a text message or email.

Live Text in Monterey could just grab text from still images, but in Ventura, the feature can also be used to grab text selections from videos. This mainly excludes 20 MacBook Pros with Radeon Pro 500-series dedicated GPUs. Apple says the feature requires an Apple M1 or M2, an Intel Iris Plus or UHD 630 integrated GPU, or a Radeon Vega or Radeon Pro (or RX) 5000 or 6000-series dedicated GPU. Metal 3 does have specific GPU requirements, but Ventura drops so many older Intel Macs from the support list that most of the ones that run Ventura will still be able to use Metal 3. This sounds pretty similar to one of the features Microsoft is offering with the DirectStorage API, which also aims to cut out bottlenecks by taking advantage of the speed of modern PCI Express-connected SSDs. Metal 3 also improves Metal's support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and adds "fast resource loading" that will let games load textures and other data directly from storage. This could be especially useful for the Mac userbase, where most GPUs will be the basic versions in the bottom-tier M1 and M2 chips rather than higher-end M1 Pro/Max/Ultra chips.

Metal 3's spatial and temporal image upscaling, similar in concept to Nvidia's DLSS, AMD's FSR, and Intel's XeSS, attempts to upscale a low-resolution image to look sharper and more detailed without requiring as much GPU performance as it would take to render the image at a higher resolution natively. The most important addition to Apple's proprietary Metal graphics API this year is a feature that has become increasingly popular in Windows games over the last few years.

If you’re looking for a shortcut to Shortcuts, Spotlight can search through and run those in Ventura as well-Shortcuts can already be added to the menu bar or the Dock or a bunch of other places in macOS, but the more, the merrier. You can additionally search for broad terms like “cat pictures,” and Spotlight will try to give you relevant results from your own files as well as the Internet all of these results can now be previewed via Quick Look with the spacebar if you want to get a closer look. Image results from multiple apps-including Notes, Messages, and the Photos app itself-will show up in Spotlight searches now, and Live Text support ensures that images that contain the words you’re searching for show up, too.
