Today's Redout 2 PC patch (version 1.1.1) added Intel XeSS support to the anti-gravity racing game released earlier this year by Italian studio 34BigThings. Redout 2 was among the first games to be listed among the early adopters of the Intel XeSS technology. As a reminder, here's how it works:
Intel Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) enables an innovative frame-rate boosting technology supported by Intel Arc graphics cards and other GPU vendors. Using AI deep learning to perform upscaling, Intel XeSS offers higher frame rates without degrading the image quality.
XeSS is a temporally amortized super-sampling/upsampling technique that drops in place of the Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) stage in the game renderer, achieving significantly better image quality than current state-of-the-art techniques in games. XeSS replaces the TAA stage with a neural network-based approach with the same set of inputs and outputs as TAA.
However, early tests were disappointing in both Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Death Stranding Director's Cut. While Intel XeSS works on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs via the built-in DP4a instructions, Intel Arc GPUs are likely to provide the best image quality and performance thanks to the optimization available through the Intel Xe Matrix (XMX) AI engines. Intel XeSS was just added to Judgment and Lost Judgment, too, by the way.
As for Redout 2, the game received a 6.7 out of 10 rating in Wccftech's official review penned by Ule.
While Redout 2 is a fun experience for the single player, it definitely lacks in a lot of areas and can become overwhelming to a lot of players for a myriad of reasons. The game's AI is also very incompetently designed with incredibly slingshot-like rubberbanding that makes competitors look like absolute klutzes when you're falling behind them or like they have hyperspeed devices on the slightest advantage. Everything is locked behind stages while most of the unlockables are just cosmetics rather than any substantial upgrades.
