Intel XeSS upscaling looks as good as DLSS in Tomb Raider and is almost as quick
Intel's entrance into the graphics card market has been a long time coming. It's taken so long, in fact, that you'd be forgiven for thinking it wasn't actually happening at all. Well, yesterday it announced the price and release date of the Arc A770(opens in new tab). It also started the ball rolling on its XeSS upscaling tech.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider(opens in new tab) is the first major title to get support for the tech, and thanks to its GPU-agnostic approach, you can try XeSS for yourself right now. Death Stranding Director's Cut(opens in new tab) also gets some XeSS love, although it doesn't seem to have been added to the standard game, which is a bit of a shame.
I've looked at XeSS running in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and straight away it looks like a worthy alternative to Nvidia's DLSS 2.0. Slightly slower performance at the same visual settings, but not by much, and the fact that you can run this on non-Intel GPUs is certainly a boon. Like AMD FSR and Nvidia DLSS, you have a range of quality settings on offer—with the option to sacrifice image quality to hit smoother frame rates if needed.
You will need a compatible graphics card to use XeSS(opens in new tab) though, that is one that supports DP4A or Intel's XMX as found in its Arc GPUs, but that's it. That covers AMD's RDNA 2 GPUs and the last three Nvidia architectures, although once again if you have an Nvidia GPU then that's probably your best option anyway.
To see how it looks I patched Lara's most recent outing to the «Sept. 27th Update» and tried it on an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti. The good news is it looks like a promising technology. The performance increase is notable compared to native and depending on your hardware, it could mean that you hit playable
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