During its GDC 2022 presentation on upscaling technologies, Intel detailed XeSS, detailing the various advantages and flexibilities associated with its cutting-edge AI-based upsampler. Just like NVIDIA’s DLSS 2.0 and AMD’s FSR 2.0, XeSS is a temporal upscaler (paired with a neural network) that is integrated prior to the post-processing stage in the rendering process. It comes with five performance presets, namely Ultra Performance, Performance, Balanced, Quality, and Ultra Quality that offer a scaling factor of 3.0, 2.0, 1.7, 1.5, 1.3, respectively.
The “Ultra Performance” preset is going to confer a performance boost of over 2.5x at 4K, meaning if your GPU struggles to push even 30 FPS in a game, XeSS UP will allow it to run at a silky smooth 75 FPS. Too good to be true? Probably, but even if it’s 2x faster with acceptable quality, it’ll be a big win for Intel. The Performance preset boosts the performance by 2.2x, Balanced by 1.8x, Quality by 1.53x, and Ultra Quality by 1.27x. Not bad at all. These performance figures are notably better than those promised by AMD’s FSR 2.0 and NVIDIA’s DLSS 2.0
It’s worth noting that although XeSS is slated to be open-source in the future, it’ll most certainly be limited to Intel Arc graphics cards for the first few months to drive sales. Furthermore, the “premium” mode of XeSS leveraging the XMX cores will be limited to the Arc GPUs, with the Radeon and GeForce cards using the DP4a fallback option which will be slightly slower.
