All of the clever upsamplers that we’ve got now—together with NVIDIA’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, and Intel’s XeSS—are essentially algorithms at their core, and like all algorithm, they are often tuned and optimized. All three firms proceed to take action, which is why sport modders and fanatics often inform people to replace the DLLs for these methods in launched video games, as patches from the builders hardly ever achieve this.
Besides dynamic decision help, XeSS 1.2 additionally has some mixture of “bug fixes, stability enhancements, and efficiency optimizations.” Exactly what, we do not know, as a result of Intel’s launch notes actually say simply that. We have not encountered any notable bugs whereas utilizing XeSS in our testing, however there are virtually assuredly some that would use squishing.
One criticism about XeSS 1.2 is that, identical to NVIDIA’s DLSS, it’s distributed as a Windows DLL binary. There’s no supply code obtainable for the approach; it is a black field that no-one exterior Intel has been in a position to peer into. Normally we would not notably care about this; most software program developed by big companies is proprietary. However, Intel broadly proclaimed that XeSS could be “open-source and cross-platform” again in 2021.
The proprietary nature of XeSS has brought about some issues for Linux avid gamers. As Phoronix factors out, Hogwarts Legacy works simply high quality beneath Valve’s Steam Play utilizing Intel’s Linux drivers, however that wasn’t the case till Intel’s builders injected a hack that spoofs the GPU vendor ID particularly for that sport as a result of if the sport tries to load the Windows-exclusive Intel XeSS DLL, it’s going to crash.
Hopefully, Intel can get the supply launched sooner somewhat than later, if for no different motive than the corporate promised it will. For now, XeSS 1.2 is backward-compatible with the 1.1 and 1.0 releases, so it needs to be fairly-straightforward to replace to the brand new model, though builders will probably must implement dynamic decision help on their finish.
