Question Intel XeSS and Monitor Resolution

[Drerunsit]

Hello everyone. I was wondering if XeSS is somehow limited by your monitor's max resolution. For example, I have a 1080p monitor, so is it worth turning on XeSS? If the idea is to achieve visuals similar to a higher resolution (e.g., 1440p in this case), and my monitor can't display that resolution to begin with, does it matter?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding and XeSS makes it look like that higher resolution without requiring a display that can natively handle it. Thanks in advance.

 

[BFG-9000]

Intel XeSS, nVidia DLSS and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution are inherently upscalers intended to improve performance so render in a lower resolution and then upscale to the native resolution for a higher framerate than the card is capable of at the native resolution. They are used when you have too much monitor and not enough card.

What you are thinking of are nVidia DSR or AMD VSR which render a frame at higher than native resolution and then downscale it to your native resolution in a form of supersampling, to improve quality. This is used when you have more card than monitor resolution. This is ordered-grid which isn't as effective as the usual rotated-grid supersampling so the quality improvement is underwhelming, but nVidia's new Deep learning dynamic super resolution (DLDSR) is supposed to be AI-assisted to improve on this. Intel does not appear to have an equivalent technology.

 

[Drerunsit]

Intel XeSS, nVidia DLSS and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution are inherently upscalers intended to improve performance so render in a lower resolution and then upscale to the native resolution for a higher framerate than the card is capable of at the native resolution. They are used when you have too much monitor and not enough card.

What you are thinking of are nVidia DSR or AMD VSR which render a frame at higher than native resolution and then downscale it to your native resolution in a form of supersampling, to improve quality. This is used when you have more card than monitor resolution. This is ordered-grid which isn't as effective as the usual rotated-grid supersampling so the quality improvement is underwhelming, but nVidia's new Deep learning dynamic super resolution (DLDSR) is supposed to be AI-assisted to improve on this. Intel does not appear to have an equivalent technology.

Got it. So, unless I have a monitor that supports the resolution I want to upscale to, XeSS is not worth enabling? I ran the XeSS Features Test in 3DMark before posting here, and it defaulted to 1440p. What I should have done was run it in 1080p, though that means I would need to run the games at a lower resolution with XeSS enabled to upscale to my native 1080p. I have a feeling that the performance boost would be negligible.

 

[BFG-9000]

I wouldn't run it unless it was on a very weak Iris Xe IGP, or it would just make everything CPU limited.

For example if you selected Performance Mode it would render the game internally at 540p and upscale it to 1080p. Supposedly you get "nearly" the image quality of real 1080p at nearly the performance of real 540p, but unless you are using a weak IGP as described above, it'll just look worse while not being much faster than 1080p.

 

[Drerunsit]

Many thanks!