Intel XeSS destroys AMD FSR 2 in Cyberpunk 2077, and is close to NVIDIA DLSS 3 in image quality

Intel’s XeSS upgrade technology comes ahead of AMD FSR 2 in Cyberpunk 2077 and almost matches NVIDIA DLSS 3 in image quality.

Intel XeSS delivers great results against AMD FSR 2 in Cyberpunk 2077 and almost matches DLSS 3 in quality mode

Cyberpunk 2077 recently got the Path Tracing update in the form of patch 1.62. Along with the addition of Path Tracing, the game has also received support for XeSS from Intel which we recently discovered provides an impressive 70%+ performance increase on Arc graphics cards. Now, a head-to-head comparison of AMD’s FSR, Intel’s XeSS, and NVIDIA’s DLSS has been put together by a YouTuber’s benchmark, MxBenchmarkPC.

For comparison, a few side-by-side image comparisons and a small drive-through section are included to see the image quality and performance differences between the three upscaling technologies. The 3 upgrade technologies are set to the “Quality” preset and run on a computer with an NVIDIA RTX 4080 graphics card. The RTX 4080 is the only card that can run all 3 technologies because XeSS and FSR are not hardware dependent while DLSS 3 cannot run Except on NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPUs.

In terms of performance, Intel XeSS 1.1, AMD FSR 2.1, and NVIDIA DLSS 3.1 technologies deliver the same performance on an RTX 4080 graphics card. There are 1-2 FPS losses here and there but these are all within the margin of error since it’s not a static scene that plays like the internal Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark .

AMD FSR 2 vs. Intel XeSS vs. NVIDIA DLSS 3 Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing (Credits: MxBenchmarkPC):

AMD FSR 2 vs. Intel XeSS vs. NVIDIA DLSS 3 Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing (Credits: MxBenchmarkPC):

AMD FSR 2 vs. Intel XeSS vs. NVIDIA DLSS 3 Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing (Credits: MxBenchmarkPC):

However, comparisons in image quality show a huge difference and Intel’s XeSS 1.1 technology completely destroys AMD’s FSR 2.1 which can’t produce a sharper image and more pronounced blue color than the rest of the two technologies. AMD’s FSR 2.1 implementation in Cyberpunk 2077 in quality mode also shows plenty of visual flyby and flash against Intel XeSS and NVIDIA DLSS 3 technology. The same YouTuber goes on to say that XeSS 1.1 was very close to DLSS 3.1 in terms of image quality.

This is really cool from the graphics team at Intel who have worked so hard to bring out XeSS for gamers. While the technology has yet to see traction similar to DLSS from NVIDIA and FSR from AMD which are now embedded in many games and applications, the Intel GPU division has been hard at work and pushing for better support and improved drivers since the launch of its Arc graphics cards.