Note: This article was written prior to the official announcement, it will be updated in more detail after Intel’s announcement.
EDIT: A new article detailing compatibility, performance, and quality differences with XeSS is now available at https://adoredtv.com/what-we-know-thus-far-about-xess-intels-open-source-ai-upscaling-competitor-to-dlss-and-fsr/
Today Intel announced XeSS, an open upscaling alternative to DLSS & FSR. If Intel’s PR isn’t overselling XeSS, it has the image quality of DLSS without the motion artifacts than can come from it. In theory, this would make it better than both DLSS & FSR.
Like DLSS, XeSS is AI based upscaler – but it won’t be locked down to a single vendor’s graphics card. Nvidia and AMD GPUs will also be able to run games with XeSS support.
There will be some variance in how it is implemented, with XeSS running XMX for Intel dGPUs and DP4a for other vendors. It’s not known how performance will be impacted while using XeSS on Radeon or Nvidia GPUs compared to an Intel ARC dGPU, but we expect to hear more from Intel about this soon.