Yesterday we took a look at the performance of Intel XeSS upscaling technology running on the Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti (opens in new tab) and while not far behind DLSS performance, it was not too far off and the image quality was impressive. A promising start for Intel. Especially considering that it works not only with Intel graphics cards, but also with AMD and Nvidia graphics cards.

Other cards will need to support DP4A (open in new tab) to support this feature; the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is used for the upscaling algorithm, which is the fallback for non-Arc GPUs. Arc GPUs such as the upcoming Arc A770 (opens in new tab) will introduce bespoke XMX acceleration to further accelerate this task.

However, there is another fallback for cards that do not support DP4A, and that is INT24, which is supported by almost all modern GPUs, including integrated GPUs such as those found in AMD's APUs.

However, while this third tier support ensures that XeSS will work reliably on many systems, questions remain about its speed. In fact, when we tested various quality settings on a Ryzen 7 5700G system, the results were less than impressive. In fact, performance was worse than running the system natively. In other words, performance is better with XeSS turned off.

Taking "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" as an example, one of the two games that currently support XeSS, we got only 20 fps without upscaling when using the highest graphics settings at 1080p. The fastest setting for XeSS was the " Performance" quality setting, but performance actually dropped to 18 fps; the Quality preset dropped even further, to 15 fps.

Running "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" at the highest settings is good for comparison with other graphics cards, but tough on this hardware. we also tried the "Low" and "Medium" presets, with similar results. native is simply faster and looks Better.

Basically, with this APU, turning on XeSS will degrade performance and worsen frame rates and should be ignored; it is possible that optimizing XeSS could turn this around, but I doubt it. Ideally, AMD GPU's FSR, but Shadow of the Tomb Raider does not support it, so the choice is XeSS or nothing.

To be fair to Intel, the graphics silicon in this chip demands a lot. There are only eight graphics cores, up to 2,000 MHz, and they must share system memory. It also uses the aging Vega architecture. Still, budget gamers can't help but dream.

It would have been great if Intel XeSS ran on such a low-power GPU, but one cannot criticize Intel for that. After all, its main reason for being is to use MXM to boost the performance of its own GPUs, which should be much faster than DP4A. the Arc A770 is scheduled for release on October 12, and we will revisit XeSS when it is available.