Intel announces a major milestone: their XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) technology is now available in over 200 games. The new Intel XeSS version 2, which brings performance improvements through AI and frame generation, is slowly making its way to market – although it still faces competition from AMD (FSR) and NVIDIA (DLLS).
Intel XeSS 2: Performance, but not in all games to the fullest
XeSS 2 brings more than just upscaling. Intel presents it as a bundle of technologies:
- XeSS Frame Generation
- XeSS Low Latency
- AI-enhanced Upscaling
Still, not everything is available in every game. Frame Generation is often deployed later, or not at all.
The official list contains 13 games, with the PC Gaming Wiki community adding another 7 titles. This brings the total to 20 games that currently use XeSS 2:
List of games with XeSS 2 support:
- Assassin’s Creed Shadows
- Black Myth: Wukong
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- Civilization VII
- Delta Force: Black Hawk Down
- Diablo IV
- F1 24
- FragPunk
- Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions
- Hogwarts Legacy
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
- KARMA: The Dark World
- Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
- Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree
- Marvel Rivals
- Mortal Kombat 1
- Naraka Bladepoint
- Payday 3
- Rise of the Ronin
- Steel Seed
Performance – up to 4x increase in FPS
Intel has released internal benchmarks. On the Arc B580 desktop card, XeSS 2 delivers a noticeable performance boost in games like Diablo IV, Hogwarts Legacy, or Marvel Rivals. In some cases, this is up to 4X when compared to native rendering.
The same trend applies to mobile GPUs – specifically the Intel Arc 140T integrated in ultrabooks. There, XeSS 2 is emerging as a key technology for playing demanding titles at 1080p.
The future of XeSS: More games and faster expansion
Intel plans to expand support. From the first deployment of XeSS 2 (December 10, 2024), an average of one game per week will be added. If this trend holds, we can expect dozens more titles by the end of the year.
The question remains, however, whether XeSS 2 will be able to hold its own against NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR in the long term – especially if there is no broader deployment of Frame Generation or opening up of code to developers.