Intel XeSS passed with flying colors by Digital Foundry: at the level of DLSS and FSR

After announcing that XeSS will be integrated into Call of Duty: MWII at launch and giving us a taste of the help it can give with ray tracing, Intel fed upscaling technology a Digital Foundryfor an analysis whose verdict is truly flattering: the Santa Clara house solution it is practically at the level of DLSS 2.0 and FSR 2.0 / 2.1solutions that have matured over time, receiving much higher feedback from developers and players.

Digital Foundry ha testato Xe Super Sampling in versione 1.187 in Shadow of the Tomb Raidera title in which the top of the Alchemist family, the Arc A770, was compared to a GeForce RTX 3070. On the Intel board, the upscaling technology can rely on XMX cores, units similar in purpose to NVIDIA’s Tensor cores, but the beauty is that XeSS also works on GPUs from other manufacturers which support Shader Model 6.4 using the DP4a instruction.

In tests conducted by Digital Foundry, upscaling from 720p to 1440p in Performance mode added 2 milliseconds in terms of frame time, which is the image rendering time. With upscaling from 1080p to 4K in Performance mode on the Arc A770, the frame time went up from 8.8 to 12.2 milliseconds, which is 3.4 ms higher. With the GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, the recorded time was 3.8 ms, which is slightly higher than using DLSS 2.0 in the same game.

The impact in terms of frame time must be correlated with the performance obtainedThere is talk of an 88% increase in frame rate with upscaling from 1080p to 4K and a 52% increase from 720p to 1440p. The frame time increases as you move towards the more qualitative modes, which render the game at resolutions closer to native, therefore with a lower performance boost. XeSS will provide Ultra Quality not present in FSR 2.0 and DLSS 2.0 which returned in the test a performance improvement in upscaling to 4K and 1440p between 16 and 23%.

Digital Foundry’s analysis shows a picture that is not quite perfect yet, there are some things to fix like jittering on the water and other details, like Lara’s hair that looks slightly better with DLSS. Furthermore, the test focused on one game, but if a good morning starts in the morning, then there is hope for the future, especially in days when alarming news is circulating about the future of Arc.