Intel XeSS, the antagonist of DLSS struggling with Hitman 3 and The Riftbreaker

As announced in August, along with dedicated GPUs Intel Arc – expected to debut in the first quarter of 2022 – we’ll see XeSS (Xe Super Sampling), an alternative and antagonistic technology to NVIDIA’s DLSS and, to a lesser extent, to AMD’s FSR. During the Intel Innovation event, the US company has XeSS shown in action on Hitman 3 and The Riftbreaker, two games that we can therefore consider the first to support technology.

Intel ran the two titles on an unidentified Arc GPU, focusing on the comparison between 1080p resolution and 4K “upscaled” with XeSS. The images speak for themselves: while the performance is similar, the image quality is decidedly superior with XeSS running. On the other hand, Intel, in a slide, stated that the technology aims to double the FPS from a native 4K to a 4K XeSS, while maintaining an image quality similar to the original one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldm4T5IIqVE

Intel also showed a short clip of Metro Exodus with active ray tracing running on Arc Alchemist GPUs and talking about technology XeGTAO (Ground-Truth Ambient Occlusion) to create high quality images, where the play of shadows and lights is more precise and detailed.

Finally, Intel talked about the technology Deep Link which will allow the Dedicated Arc Alchemist GPUs to work alongside the integrated Xe graphics in the Core CPUs to speed up some workloads. During the event, Lisa Pearce, Intel’s Graphics Software Engineering Director, showed how the simultaneous action of integrated and dedicated GPUs allows speed up transcoding with HandBrake by up to 40%.