Intel Arc GPUs may have stumbled – but XeSS frame rate booster looks a triumph
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Intel’s XeSS frame rate-boosting technology – the rival to Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR – has been put to the test and proved to be an outstanding performer, which should come as a relief to Team Blue, after having had a rough time with lately. are Arc graphics cards.
Digital Foundry (opens in new tab) (as discovered by Tom’s hardware (opens in new tab)) tested XeSS using an Arc Alchemist A770 GPU, the flagship model for Intel’s first-generation cards.
This was a thorough affair using a custom build of Shadow of the Tomb Raider that supports XeSS, with some massive jumps in frame rate in certain scenarios, and some more modest but still valuable boosts in others.
For example, an 88% increase in frame rate was found at 4K resolution with XeSS ‘performance’ mode – the setting that favors frames per second (fps) over image quality. That means compared to the game running on native 4K, the upscaled 4K with XeSS was almost twice as fast, a blistering increase (with the caveat that when using performance mode, the graphics quality is noticeably lower compared to native 4K ).
However, using the ‘quality’ mode, which aims to keep image quality at a comparable level to native 4K, there was still a 47% increase in frame rate, which is very impressive. Even ‘ultra quality’, which rides the hardest to get a near-native 4K image, still witnessed a 23% performance boost, which is well worth the effort.
Less benefit was registered at 1440p – unsurprisingly given that 4K is clearly much more stressful for the graphics card – but the performance mode still ushered in a 52% frame rate increase, which is quite handy. In quality mode, a 26% increase in fps was observed.
So what about the other facet of XeSS, the image quality achieved versus native? Well, Digital Foundry found that Intel’s upscaling technology performed admirably, and was indeed a worthy match – give or take – for Nvidia DLSS (with both in quality mode, of course).
The strange glitch was noticed in certain modes when examining static images, such as glittering artifacts, but hopefully these kinds of minor flaws will be ironed out soon by Intel. Sometimes this can happen with DLSS as well, but Digital Foundry clearly illustrated that it was more common with XeSS, and when it happened with both, it was noticeably less so with DLSS.
When the game was in motion, XeSS offered impressive clarity comparable to DLSS, and with scenes with fast movements – which are difficult to track for scaling technology – XeSS also performed well. And that’s in stark contrast to FSR 2.0, which struggled more with movement than DLSS in these respects.
Analysis: the best of both DLSS and FSR in one?
As a result, this is a real achievement for Intel with its first run on XeSS. Like DLSS, it’s a temporary scaling solution, using AI for refinement (whereas FSR 2.0 doesn’t use those machine learning chops – though that could change in the future, if the rumors are true). So we hoped to see similar results to DLSS, but it was far from certain that Intel would make it happen. However, from this first in-depth look at XeSS, it appears that this is the case; which is great news.
Mainly because the big advantage of XeSS is that it works not only with Intel’s Arc graphics cards, but also with the company’s integrated graphics, as well as with rival GPUs, meaning AMD and Nvidia products. That’s because Intel has taken the commendable path of this being an open standard (like AMD, commendable to both companies, but not Nvidia, which owns DLSS and only works with its own GPUs).
There are, of course, caveats to support for other graphics cards, as it’s only relevant for more modern GPUs (which support HLSL Shader Model 6), and there are some drawbacks elsewhere. Namely that the results are not quite good quality when using an Arc graphics card, and Digital Foundry shows an example of an RTX 3070 that has a slightly slower frame time with XeSS (but there is not a huge impact in this regard, anyway ). Sure, even with some drawbacks, it’s still great to have the ability to increase the frame rate for those with non-RTX Nvidia graphics cards (or indeed AMD GPUs).
So the bottom line is that Intel XeSS already seems to be a worthy rival to DLSS, and with further improvement – and the fact that it’s applicable to a much wider range of GPUs – it could just be Intel’s secret weapon. Though of course we need to evaluate how it performs in other games – and we also want those Arc A7 graphics cards to hit the shelves soon. Not to mention that Team Blue is doubling down on its efforts and working to nail the Arc graphics driver at a faster pace.