UL solutions, developer of the 3DMark benchmark, has released a new feature test (opens in new tab) for Intel's XeSS AI Enhanced Upscaling Technology. The test is available as a free download for Advanced and Professional Edition owners.

The release of the test coincides with the release of Intel's Arc graphics cards; XeSS will also work on new Nvidia and AMD GPUs, see Arc A770 Review (opens in new tab). Testing is based on the Port Royal benchmark. This is a very intensive sequence with lots of raytracing effects and reflective surfaces to show off XeSS's capabilities.

The benchmark is run twice, once with XeSS disabled and then enabled. Both FPS measurements are displayed with increasing percentages; the second test option is called XeSS Frame Inspector, which displays a total of 15 frames. The user can then zoom in on any portion of the image to determine XeSS image quality.

We ran the test on an RTX 3080 Ti system with a Ryzen 9 7950X CPU (open in new tab), and the results were 59.44 FPS without XeSS and 76.23 FPS with XeSS on. This represents a 28.2% performance improvement, with no degradation in image quality. However, when the DLSS 2.0 Feature Test was run, there was an improvement of over 100%, from 62.18 FPS to 134.65 FPS.

Running the Intel XeSS Feature Test requires a GPU that supports Shader Model 6.4 and Microsoft DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1. XeSS-enabled GPUs include Intel Arc GPUs, Intel Arc GPUs supporting the above technologies XeSS-enabled GPUs include Intel Arc GPUs, AMD Radeon GPUs and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs that support the above technologies. Windows 11 or Windows 10 64-bit 20H2 or later is also required.

If you plan to purchase an Arc GPU, it is definitely worth playing with XeSS to get better performance or higher image quality (or both.) While Intel's release of the XeSS standard is a welcome addition, each manufacturer has its own specific architecture to focus on optimizing their upscaling implementations, it seems safest to stick with each brand's technology. For now.