Intel released an explainer video for its upcoming XeSS AI upscaling technology, and showcased how the tech works on its nearly ready for public release
Arc Alchemist GPUs. It used the fastest Arc A770 for the demonstrations, though it's difficult to say how the performance will stack up against the
best graphics cards based on the limited performance details shown.
If you're at all familiar with
Nvidia's DLSS, which has been around for four years now in various incarnations, the video should spark a keen sense of Deja Vu. Tom Petersen, who formerly worked for Nvidia and gave some of the old DLSS presentations, walks through the XeSS fundamentals. Long story short, XeSS sounds very much like a mirrored version of Nvidia's DLSS, except it's designed to work with Intel's deep learning XMX cores rather than Nvidia's tensor cores. The tech can also work with other GPUs, however, using DP4a mode, which might make it an interesting alternative to
AMD's FSR 2.0 upscaler.
In the demos shown by Intel, XeSS looked to be working well. Of course, it's difficult to say for sure when the source video is a 1080p compressed version of the actual content, but we'll save detailed image quality comparisons for another time. Performance gains look to be similar to what we've seen with DLSS, with over a 100% frame rate boost in some situations when using XeSS Performance mode.
