Not flawless, thoughts you—for one factor, the checks solely lined one recreation, and that is Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Regardless of being showcased solely in a single launched recreation up to now, XeSS appears to comport itself fairly nicely. As that web site’s Alex Battaglia factors out, it is largely inferior to DLSS, however that methodology has had years of refinement. In the meantime, XeSS is not even technically out but.
With these caveats in place, the comparability is much more even than you’d possible anticipate from a pre-release upscaling answer. More often than not, it seems fairly good, and normally higher than merely layering on TAA to easy out the imperfections. That is greater than we are able to say for AMD’s first try, anyway.
In some methods, XeSS is best than AMD’s second try, too. FSR 2.0 struggled with “disocclusion” artifacts when quickly shifting objects revealed beforehand unseen components of the scene. XeSS does not undergo any of those issues, at the least in Alex’s testing. Nonetheless, it does nonetheless have some noticeable picture high quality issues.
Nearly all of XeSS points come all the way down to issues coping with tremendous particulars within the scene. The AI powering XeSS does not appear capable of deal with objects that include repeating particulars when there’s inadequate decision, leading to highly effective shimmering artifacts or moiré patterns. DLSS struggled with artifacts like this in its 1.0 revision, too, so we anticipate Intel can get these issues resolved.
One main benefit that XeSS has over DLSS is that it runs on opponents’ {hardware}, albeit utilizing a much less environment friendly algorithm. Sadly, Battaglia did not do an image-quality comparability between XeSS on the Arc GPU and XeSS on a GeForce GPU, however he did briefly check out efficiency. The price of XeSS was about 1.5 ms larger versus DLSS on an RTX 3070, which isn’t unhealthy in any respect.
Nonetheless, Intel has already admitted that XeSS on competitor GPUs will not obtain the identical degree of high quality as when working on an Arc card. In that case, with out picture high quality comparisons between the 2, it is exhausting to say how the approach compares to AMD’s equally open FSR 2, particularly since that methodology simply received an enormous enchancment to the precise space that XeSS struggles with in its 2.1 revision.
Intel says that XeSS is coming to greater than twenty video games, together with big-name titles like Name of Obligation: Trendy Warfare II and Demise Stranding: Director’s Minimize. The know-how can be unveiled on or earlier than the launch of the high-end XeSS playing cards, which must be any day now.