Intel officially released its XeSS upscaling technology earlier this week which can be enabled for Intel Arc & also, NVIDIA & AMD GPUs. Although Intel's high-end Arc graphics cards launch on the 12th of October, tech outlets Tomshardware, TechPowerUP, and PCGamer, have taken the XeSS game to the spin on existing cards.
Reviews are coming in for the Intel XeSS AI-Upscaler, utilizing AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards and seeing varying results
There are two integrated binaries in Intel XeSS, the first supports XMX acceleration on the Intel Arc GPUs, and the second uses DP4a instructions found on modern graphics cards. The second mode is slated to function with graphics cards such as Intel's 11th Gen graphics, AMD Vega 20, Navi 1X, NVIDIA Pascal, and more current cards. Reviewers have only managed to get their hands on the Arc A770 & Arc A750 graphics cards now and their reviews won't be published till next week so it looks like most outlets are focusing on the performance the tech offers on existing cards and competitor GPUs.
PCGamer have provided a comparison between standard, DLSS, and XeSS rendering with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card. The GPU offers 112 fps with XeSS set to the "Quality" setting. In comparison, this outcome is slower than NVIDIA's DLSS undertaking.
Tom's Hardware did a more in-depth look at the Intel XeSS performance, offering a thorough comparison between numerous AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards, as well as older GPUs. Intel XeSS works fairly flawlessly with every graphics card but does not offer a significant performance increase each time. Intel XeSS will run slower.
Some graphics cards that were tested displayed minor improved performance. This change in performance could result from DP4a instructions requiring to be supported natively by all graphics cards but simulated with 24-bit integers, demonstrating why AMD's RX Vega and Navi 10 series produce slower results with Intel's new upscaler. The issue is thought to be the "6GB VRAM bottleneck," which is odd for a game that came out four years ago.
The results shown above are of XeSS "Quality" mode compared with NVIDIA DLSS Quality and native 1440p rendering. The results are also the second-best image profile available for Intel's new technology. Intel has established that image quality and performance between XeSS DP4a and XeSS XMX will vary, as shown in the introductory video demonstrated earlier this week.
Most of the time, Intel XeSS DP4a provided no added benefit to the performance of any of the games tested. With the XeSS technology still in the early stages, there is a lengthy path for the company to make, fixing issues and optimizing performance down the line. Intel could prioritize its Arc XMX algorithm, especially with the soon-to-be-released Arc A7 GPUs. Lucky for Intel, there is only a single API and SDK, meaning that development would progress roughly simultaneously.
News Sources: Toms Hardware, PC Gamer, VideoCardz
