Intel XeSS Let’s You Enjoy Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City With Over 70% Faster Performance On Arc GPUs

Cyberpunk 2077 recently received its latest 1.62 patch which added support for Intel's XeSS tech found on Arc GPUs, allowing for a massive boost in performance.

Intel recently informed gamers using an Intel ArcGPU that the Cyberpunk 2077 received support for the XeSS technology which allows for a major performance boost on Arc graphics cards such as the Arc A770 and Arc A750.

XeSS is an AI-based super-sampling technique which reconstructs a low-resolution non-antialiased frame into a high-resolution fully-antialiased frame. And it does that at a fraction of the cost of high-resolution native rendering.

Good news gamers! Cyberpunk 2077 will run even faster now on Intel Arc GPUs thanks to XeSS. Thanks to the efforts of CDPR’s developers, they implemented the tech and released a patch that boosts performance significantly. This comes in handy if you play with ray tracing features on. We measured up to 71% uplift, hitting above that sweet 60FPS marker with the Intel Arc A750 graphics card.

via Intel

The blog post shows the increase in performance by comparing running the game with and without Intel XeSS activated. The test setup featured the Intel Core i9-13900K CPU, the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z790 HERO (BIOS 0904), the Intel Arc A750 8GB Limited Edition GPU, the Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5 DRAM 5600 MHz, and the Corsair MP600 Pro XT 4 TB NVMe.

Most of the work to grant Intel access to utilizing the XeSS technology was done by the CDPR development team. In the recent patch for the game, the Intel team could see a 71% increase in frames per second (FPS) with XeSS activated by using the above specifications. Without the graphics boosting technology, the game was running at 39 fps, while with it started was running above 60 fps, maxing out to 67 fps on average. Now XeSS was set to "Performance" mode which does affect image quality but even with a quality preset, you can still gain a lot more performance.

Intel's XeSS technology is still in version 1.1.0 and has worked its way into becoming more accessible from more game studios, such as 505 Games, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Warner Bros., and more. The recent version included improvements to visual quality in the implemented library of supported PC games. Also, it improved the temporal stability using a new XeSS Upscaling model for cross-vendor and integrated GPUs with a separate and more advanced XeSS upscaling model for the Arc graphics card series to improve flickering and Moire.

The benefit of Intel Arc GPUs and XeSS technology, especially in games such as Cyberpunk 2077, is that users can receive a boost in quality and performance in a more cost-friendly option than if they were to purchase an AMD or NVIDIA GPU. The performance may not be as high as NVIDIA and the company's RTX 40 series GPUs or AMD's Radeon GPUs, but when the Intel Arc series cards are several hundred dollars less than their competitors with decent performance, its hard not to pass up looking at Intel as a viable option until GPUs can be more affordable for users.

News Source: Intel Arc Blog