Intel’s recently released XeSS 1.3 upscaling technology has been tested against FSR & DLSS and it holds up pretty well with much better motion clarity than the previous versions of the tech.
Intel XeSS 1.3 Does A Great Job In Reducing Ghosting For Better Motion Clarity, Now On Par With DLSS & Ahead of FSR
During its announcement, Intel revealed that XeSS 1.3 will be optimized to offer more detailed image reconstruction, better anti-aliasing, less ghosting, and increased temporal stability. This seems to be the case as a demonstration by benchmarking channel, S2Games Bench, shows a comparison of the new tech against the competition.
For comparisons, XeSS 1.3 was tested against XeSS 1.2, DLSS 3.7 and FSR 2.2. All XeSS 1.2 modes were running the DP4a model which can be used across all GPUs (Intel/NVIDIA/AMD) while XMX model can only be used with Intel Arc GPUs with XMX hardware acceleration. The XMX mode does provide better image quality than DP4a along with better performance.
To test all upscaling technologies, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 GPU was used. Right off the bat, XeSS 1.3 offers superior object motion clarity and less ghosting than XeSS 1.2 as you can see many flying insects leaving a trail behind them in the older version. That’s not the case with Intel XeSS 1.3 Quality and Ultra Quality modes.
So next up, we have the comparisons between XeSS, FSR, and DLSS. Here, XeSS Ultra Quality (DP4a) mode sits well against the competition, providing better image clarity versus FSR & matching DLSS. AMD’s FSR oversharpens the image which might look good to some but it produces very visible aliased images as seen in the example below:
And you can see ghosting trails left behind when Alloy runs and similar trails are being left behind when looking at flying insects on the screens. Furthermore, the water looks very smooth on DLSS and XeSS but produces a very annoying shimmering effect on the FSR screen.
So it looks like Intel has done a very good job of making their tech not only run better but also look great. You can already use XeSS 1.3 in games that already support XeSS 1.2 or older versions of the technology by simply replacing the “libxess” dll files. You can find the new XeSS 1.3 files at GitHub here.
The one big thing missing from Intel XeSS at the moment is frame generation support but there is already work being done on that so we might get to see it soon!