Intel has launched a new version of its XeSS upscaling technology that competes with Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR for accelerating frame rates in PC games.
Intel
On a PC with an Arc A750 GPU, Intel found a particularly impressive jump in frames per second (fps) running Diablo 4 at 1440p resolution (with high details and ray tracing enabled). Without XeSS the action RPG ran at 37 fps, but with XeSS this increased to 71 fps – and with the new XeSS 1.3 the game achieved 91 fps. That’s a performance gain of almost 30% over the previous incarnation of XeSS.
Other games have more modest, but still valuable improvements, on the order of about 5 extra fps, a boost of about 10%.
Intel also demonstrated integrated graphics with the Arc GPU in an Intel Core Ultra processor, running games at 1080p in medium detail. On average, Team Blue found that XeSS 1.3 delivered 8% more fps compared to previous versions.
Not only faster, but also nicer scaling
However, XeSS 1.3 is not just about faster frame rates for your GPU, Intel has also refined the image quality. The company tells us that version 1.3 of its upscaling technology benefits from an updated model that offers more detail in the image, better anti-aliasing (smoothing of irregularities) and less ghosting.
All in all, it seems like a big step forward for XeSS, but Intel will have to keep pushing with its upscaling technology – because AMD and Nvidia are certainly not standing still.
Nvidia just released DLSS 3.7, which offers similar improvements to what we see here from Intel (less ghosting, better temporal stability). And AMD may have taken even bigger steps – potentially finally bringing AI into the mix with FSR. (Note that both Intel and Nvidia are already using hardware-accelerated AI cores to boost their respective scaling technologies).
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