EN DE CN BR ES RU
Image
Icon

Intel Shows Off XeSS Super Resolution, Promises Huge Performance Gains

Intel’s upcoming Alder Lake CPUs have no doubt piqued everyone’s interest, but XeSS Super Resolution upscaling also warrants a mention!... | 30. October 2021

Intel’s upcoming Alder Lake CPUs have no doubt piqued everyone’s interest, but XeSS Super Resolution upscaling also warrants a mention! Based on everything that was shown thus far, it sure does look like a slice of the future! And that’s really saying something considering the sheer potency and effectiveness of NVIDIA’s DLSS.

Still, Intel seems to have figured out a similar and yet noticeably more powerful form of upscaling and, needless to say, we can’t wait for it to be released and subsequently implemented in some of today’s most popular titles!

As promised, Intel has shown off a couple of XeSS demos during its Innovation 2021 event and, frankly, we were not left indifferent.

XeSS Super Resolution Upscaling | A Superb Demonstration

The games that were shown off were IO Interactive’s Hitman 3 along with Exor Studio’s The Riftbreaker. Both were running on one of Intel’s upcoming Xe ARC Alchemist GPUs and the results are staggering, to say the least.

You can see just how big of a difference XeSS makes when upscaling a clean 1080p image to 4K, and that becomes ever more obvious once things are zoomed in. The demonstration itself was a compressed 1080p video and yet it’s still easy to discern the huge boost in visual clarity.

Both titles are noticeably sharper and more detailed and, well, it’s hard not to get hyped for what’s to come if Intel really does end up delivering such a tremendous feature in just a few months’ time.

Intel has also shown off a brief raytracing demo in Metro Exodus. This brand new method titled Ground-Truth Ambient Occlusion (or XeGTAO, for short) is supposedly a more advanced form of screen-space ambient occlusion and will deliver even greater accuracy than any other method currently being employed by developers. Whether that’s actually true still remains to be seen, but the following images definitely paint a wholly posittive picture.

Finally, all game developers will have access to Intel’s XeSS technology, regardless if they’re a small indie studio or a AAA behemoth churning out vast open worlds on a yearly basis. Better yet, all of this will be available on NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards as well, so you won’t have to go out and buy any of Intel’s upcoming GPUs to enjoy any of these marvelous features.

A Promising Hybrid Approach

Last but certainly not least, if you plan on purchasing one of Intel’s upcoming Alder Lake CPUs, you’ll be happy to know that developers will be able to harness and leverage their hybrid nature so as to reach even higher performance numbers.

Intel’s calling this Deep Link — a fitting title, no doubt. What it means basically is that if you happen to have an Alder Lake CPU with an integrated graphics card and an ARC Alchemist GPU, your system will allocate different tasks to each and, therefore, harness both at the exact same time.

This should result in quite a noticeable performance boost in all creator-focused workloads like rendering, transcoding, and so on. An interesting feature, no doubt, but also one that’ll require you to have an all-Intel rig which, in all fairness, isn’t all that enticing.

Everything Working in Unison

In any case, we’ll find out a whole lot more in just a few months (Q1 2022) once these oh-so-interesting Alchemist GPUs finally hit the market!