Intel in hearty interviews about the graphics card Arc

On August 18, Intel went from small short posts on social media to seriously start talking about its first graphics cards, which by the way will be sold under the brand Arc. There were overall reviews of the Xe-HPG (High Performance Gaming) architecture, a counterpart to Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and fantasy-less code names for the future.

In the wake of this, Intel is conducting lively interviews with Digital Foundry and Wccftech, in which Intel delves into several topics. The biggest place in both interviews is Intel’s own equivalent of DLSS called Xe Super Sampling (XESS). Among other things, a deeper insight is given into how XESS works and that technology like Nvidia’s DLSS 2.0 should not need to be “trained” for specific game titles.

Intel also says that XESS will work on competing graphics cards, provided that they support Shader Model 6.4 and then more specifically 8-bit operations with the instruction DP4a. That means Nvidia’s graphics cards from the GTX 1000 series and later, as well as AMD’s latest Radeon RX 6000 models and onwards. To seriously make XESS the standard for machine learning in games, there is also the ambition to release the technology that Open source code.

AI does two things. One is extrapolation where it says ‘there’s information here, I’m just going to move it forward in some kind of reasonable way’. But it also does hallucination, where you kind of say, I’ve seen things in the past that are like this. So wouldn’t it be great if there was a tree here? You know, this is what AI does and all of that stuff is perfect for games. And there are many, many different applications…

In one of the answers, an Intel Tom Petersen also dares to speculate about how upscaling from a lower resolution to a higher one is not the final destination for machine learning in games. For those who want to know more about Intel’s first graphics card in over 20 years and XESS, we recommend reading both interviews!

► Digital Foundry: How Intel Alchemist GPUs and XeSS upscaling will change PC gaming
► Wccftech: The Intel XeSS Interview with Principal Engineer Karthik Vaidyanathan

What do you think of Intel’s upcoming graphics card and vision of a “DLSS” for all hardware regardless of brand?