Intel XeSS Destroys AMD FSR 2 In Cyberpunk 2077, Comes Close To NVIDIA DLSS 3 In Image Quality

Intel's XeSS upscaling tech comes out ahead of AMD FSR 2 in Cyberpunk 2077 and almost matches NVIDIA DLSS 3 in image quality.

Cyberpunk 2077 recently got its Path Tracing update in the form of the 1.62 Patch. Along with the addition of Path Tracing, the game also received support for Intel's XeSS which we recently found out delivers an amazing 70%+ performance boost on Arc graphics cards. Now, a direct comparison between AMD's FSR, Intel's XeSS, and NVIDIA's DLSS has been put out by benchmarking YouTuber, MxBenchmarkPC.

For comparison, a few side-by-side image comparisons and a small driving section are included to see the image quality and performance differences between the three upscaling technologies. All three upscaling technologies were set to their "Quality" preset and ran on a PC with an NVIDIA RTX 4080 graphics card. The RTX 4080 is the only card that can run all three technologies since XeSS & FSR are hardware-agnostic while DLSS 3 can only be run on NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPUs.

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

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

The comparisons in image quality however show a big difference and the Intel XeSS 1.1 technology completely destroys AMD's FSR 2.1 which is unable to produce a sharp image and has more visible blue than the rest of the two technologies. AMD's FSR 2.1 implementation in Cyberpunk 2077 in the quality mode also shows much visual artifcating and shimmering versus the Intel XeSS and NVIDIA DLSS 3 tech. The YouTuber himself goes on to say that XeSS 1.1 was very close to DLSS 3.1 in terms of image quality.

That's really superb from Intel's graphics team who have worked hard to bring XeSS out to gamers. Although the technology has yet to see similar traction as NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR which are now included in multiple games and applications, the Intel GPU division is hard at work & pushing for better support and optimized drivers since the launch of Arc graphics cards.