XeSS is arguably the most boasted-about new graphics technology by Intel. A performance enhancement that is functionally similar to AMD FSR or NVIDIA DLSS, XeSS will instrumental in making Arc "Alchemist" GPUs offer high performance with minimal loss to image quality, especially given that Intel's first crack at premium gaming GPUs also happens to include real-time ray tracing support, to meet DirectX 12 Ultimate specs.

Intel announced that XeSS won't be debuting with the Arc 3 series mobile GPUs that launched yesterday (March 30), but instead alongside the Arc 5 and Arc 7 series slated for early-Summer (late-May to early-June). At launch, several AAA titles will be optimized for XeSS, including "Ghostwire: Tokyo," "Death Stranding," "Anvil," "Hitman III," "GRID Legends," etc.Unlike AMD FSR, Intel XeSS leverages AI deep-learning to attempt to restore detail in the upscaled output of a game that's made to render at a lower resolution than what your display is capable of. This leverages the XMX (Xe Matrix Extensions) hardware on the silicon, which accelerate deep-learning neural-net building and training. The Xe HPG architecture sees each Xe core get a dedicated XMX unit—think of these as functionally similar to the Tensor cores in NVIDIA RTX GPUs.

The way Intel describes it, the XeSS pipeline takes advantage of motion vectors, as well as temporal frames. Only the 3D scene is put through the XeSS AI-accelerated upscaling pass, while post-FX and HUD are rendered at native resolution. The XeSS SDK is open not just for Intel GPUs, but also GPUs from other brands that support Shader Model 6.4.