All ‘Architecture Day 2021, Intel has unveiled details of its next generation products, including the series of graphics cards Alchemist bow which will be launched next year, and on the Intel XeSS upscaling technology.
Intel’s scaling technology will use instructions XMX available on DG2 (Arc Alchemist) GPUs or DP4a instructions available in Intel integrated graphics based on Xe-LP architecture and competing products, such as NVIDIA Pascal GP102-106 GPUs.
Intel XeSS technology is based on neural networks, which puts it in the same category as NVIDIA DLSS. This technology will rely on motion vectors and history buffers, which they should improve the quality of moving graphics. Intel’s shared demos are based on slow scenes and don’t give us a full picture of the technology’s potential, yet even months before Alchemist GPUs are available, Intel is ready to demonstrate its technology – which is no small task.
The demo runs on a pre-production Arc Alchemist for desktop. The video shows a double performance increase in 4K XeSS compared to native 4K resolution.
As reported VideoCardz, gamers should be happy to hear that Intel is planning to Open source its technology to game developers and competitors. The initial plan is to offer SDKs to some developers. Once the adoption of XeSS begins, Intel will choose open source, which could represent a threat to AMD FSR and NVIDIA DLSS, if the technology were to provide better results and easier implementation. Intel has confirmed that the XeSS XMX SDK version will be available at the end of this month with the DP4a version coming later this year.
XeSS could therefore shake up Nvidia’s DLSS technology and the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, the latter presented in June of this year and highly regarded as open source and very easy to implement. It only remains to wait and see how the implementation of Intel XeSS will be done and what will be its real improvements in terms of performance in games.