Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
We covered the XeSS performance in more detail in the A770 review, but we also wanted to show the numbers here. So the summary is that XeSS upscaling can boost performance quite a bit, up to double in some cases. That's using the Performance setting, though, which renders one-fourth as many pixels before upscaling.
There are a handful of games now available with XeSS support. It's important to note that XeSS has two different operating modes. On Arc GPUs, the XMX hardware handles upscaling and provides higher-quality results. On non-Arc cards, DP4a (8-bit integer) shader operations are used, performance gains are much lower, and the upscaling quality also suffers.
Put another way, AMD's FSR 2.1 will almost always beat XeSS running in DP4a mode unless Intel can make some major improvements to the underlying algorithm. But XMX mode basically uses the same ideas that power DLSS, and we expect with enough effort, Intel could eventually match the quality of DLSS 2.
We only had time to test the A770 and A750 cards in two games, using native, Quality, and Performance modes. We tested at three resolutions as well. We wouldn't recommend going below Quality mode at 1080p, while Balanced or Quality modes are usually fine for 1440p, and even 4K with Performance mode can look quite good.
With a limited selection of games that support XeSS, we ran into system bottlenecks at lower resolutions, particularly with Death Stranding. Performance was fine without XeSS but didn't improve much at all until we were running at 1440p and 4K.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is more demanding since we maxed out the settings and enabled ray-traced shadows. The A750 saw up to a 44% improvement at 4K with Quality mode, but still very little change at 1080p. Given the A770 saw more of an improvement, it appears there's some VRAM limitation — or maybe additional driver tuning is necessary.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content
