Yesterday we saw the performance of the Intel XeSS upscaling tech running on the Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti. (opens in new tab)While it doesn’t quite match the performance of DLSS, it wasn’t far behind 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 must support DP4A to support this feature. (opens in new tab)A GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is used for the upscaling algorithm and is a fallback for non-Arc GPUs. Arc GPUs such as Arc A770 (opens in new tab)introduces bespoke XMX acceleration to make this work even faster.
However, there is another fallback for cards that don’t support DP4A, which is INT24. We see INT24 support in almost all modern GPUs. This includes integrated GPUs like those found in AMD’s APUs.
However, while this third layer support ensures that XeSS will work on many systems, its speed is questionable. In fact, when we tested different quality settings on the Ryzen 7 5700G system, the results were less than impressive. I’m seeing really worse performance than running natively. So you actually get better performance with XeSS turned off.
Using Shadow of the Tomb Raider, one of the two games that currently support XeSS, as an example and using the highest graphics settings at 1080p, it was just 20 fps without upscaling. XeSS’s fastest setting was the Performance Quality setting, which actually dropped performance to his 18fps. The Quality preset drops this even further, down to 15fps.
Running Shadow of the Tomb Raider on highest settings is good for comparison with other graphics cards, but harsh for this hardware. I also tried running it with the low and medium presets with similar results. Native is simply the faster option and looks better.
Turning on XeSS will result in slower performance and lower frame rates, so basically I recommend ignoring XeSS on this APU. I doubt it, but optimizations to XeSS could turn this around. Ideally for AMD’s GPU he would use FSR, but Shadow of the Tomb Raider doesn’t support it, so the options are his XeSS or nothing.
To be fair, Intel asks a lot from the graphics silicon on this chip. There are only 8 graphics cores, up to 2,000MHz, and you’ll have to make do with sharing system memory. We also see the aging Vega architecture. Still, budget gamers can’t help but dream.
It would be nice if Intel XeSS could run on such a low power GPU, but Intel cannot be criticized. After all, the main reason for existing is to improve the performance of his GPU in-house using his MXM which is much faster than DP4A. The Arc A770 he’s set to release on October 12th and we’re pretty sure we’ll be revisiting the XeSS when it launches.
