Intel has released a new video, showcasing its DLSS competitor, XeSS, in a brand new GDC 2022 tech demo. In this video, we get to see XeSS and how it fares against native 4K and native 1080p resolutions.
As Intel stated, this demo is running on an Intel Arc GPU (Codename Alchemist) at 4K resolution and is built using Unreal Engine with DX12 enabled.
This video is an excerpt from Intel’s GDC 2022 session: Intel Xe Super Sampling (XeSS)—an AI-based Upscaling for Real-Time Rendering.
Although there isn’t any ETA on when XeSS will become available, we do know that it will be vendor agnostic. As such, it will support GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA. And, since AMD has announced FSR 2.0, it will be interesting to see how both XeSS and FSR will fare against NVIDIA’s DLSS.
Lastly, the first gaming studios that will support XeSS will be 505 Games, EXOR Studios, Fishlabs, Codemasters, Hashbane, IO Interactive, Illfonic, Kojima Productions, Massive Work Studio, PUBG Studios, Techland, Ubisoft and Wonder People.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Vendor agnostic? All the tech specs provided so far say that XeSS has two separate and distinct codepaths: one for Intel graphics (more optimized) and another less optimized codepath for everyone else.
That’s semi-agnostic tbh.
Some solutions aren’t even designed to work on other vendors (DLSS).
>Although there isn’t any ETA on when XeSS will become available
You should be able to take it from Death Stranding, right? Comes out on the 30th.
Finally some competition for DLSS.
First FSR 2.0 and now this.
Competition is great, more spent on research toward better tech rather than pilled in the stockholders pockets
Finally, someone developing GPU tech who’s willing to admit that TAA is blurry.
As for XeSS, it looks good in the demonstration videos. Hopefully it lives up to those demonstrations, because I like both clear/sharp visuals and high FPS, so anything that can promise me both is a major win in my book.
I take these results with a grain of salt because the 1080p footage was definitely blurry. much more blurry than TAA has to be. that said, I believe XeSS can rival DLSS and given that it will run on Intel and AMD cards that’s a great development.
The closer you look at this, the worse it looks. High frequency information in particularly is very poorly resolved. Resembling more of a bunch of squiggly blobs like Waifu 2x without denoising first.
There is a lot of ringing(Oversharpening), and high frequency specular highlights popping in and out without proper stable subpixel resolve and coherency. (All over the first video and especially evident under fast motion in the second video after 3:20.) Can’t handle moire as evidenced at 00:50 in second video. Temporal coherency under actual normal circumstances. (Not stationary and small controlled camera movements) is very low as the image quality rapidly changes frame to frame.
Comparing it to a very bad 1080p render with UE4 TAA tuned to make it look as blurry and bad as possible (Like turning on DOF in the 1080p footage at 1:47 but turning it off for XESS) isn’t exactly a fair comparison either. (Considering XESS shares many of it’s same issues). You could get a better 1080p TAA image with it properly tuned and a more fair comparison would be UE4’s Temporal Upscaling.
Even then, the “Native 4k” footage they compare to is also deliberately tuned to look as bad as possible without it being obvious either. (Weighting, pixel resolve width set to higher than 2,etc).
Just another tool to excuse bad optimization.