Intel XeSS Delayed? Don’t Worry, AMD’s FSR 2.0 Is Here To Save The Day! Intel Graphics Work Well With With Both FSR 1.0 & FSR 2.0

Recently, AMD’s new FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 technology, also called FSR 2.0, debuted and was tested against the game Deathloop, offering surprising results when matched against the competing NVIDIA DLSS solution. Improving on graphics is one thing, but with its open-source capability and providing better results on older technology, it is a significant focus right now.

Using AMD’s newest FSR 2.0 upscaling technology, Benchmark tests on Intel Integrated graphics offer surprising results

AMD has not provided a complete list of recommended graphics processors with their newest graphics enhancing technology, but they have hinted at particular series of graphics cards for specific resolutions. If you are running an upscaled 4K resolution, the company prefers the Radeon RX 6000 series graphics processors. When lowering the resolution to 1440p, AMD suggests the RX 5000 and RX Vega series graphics cards. And, for the standard 1080p upscaling, the company recommends their Radeon RX 590 or comparable graphics cards.

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Website Tom’s Hardware decided to check how capable the technology is on a hardware device that would potentially not handle most games easily. One such test the website chose to run this week was pitting a Tiger Lake-based laptop from 2020, offering a Core i7-1165G7 processor with Iris Xe graphics, pushing around 96 Execute Units. Inside, we are looking at 16GB of LPDDR4x-4267 memory.

Source: Tom’s Hardware

The Intel-backed website’s other laptop choice is a Core i7-1065G7-based laptop offering Gen11 graphics technology. This system also contains 16GB of memory, but the website has chosen to use a system that provides LPDDR4x-3200. The system comes from the Ice Lake processor family, which numerically offers half of what Xe-LP graphics technology provides.

Before showing the results of the testing of Deathloop on the two laptop computers utilizing AMD’s FSR 2.0, they point out that the developers warn users that Intel graphics-based systems are not supported and may not work as intended. But Gelsinger is paying their bills, so let’s see their results.

Outside of the obvious, the unsupported game took quite some time to load on the Core i7-1165G7 processor with Iris Xe graphics laptop — (four and a half minutes to get to the main menu). After waiting almost five minutes, the game was working on the system, and the tech site decided to run what benchmarks could be completed. The settings were currently as low as could be processed with a 1280 x 720 px resolution.

The first benchmark checked the system’s graphics at 720p resolution on the lowest picture setting possible and then added native with temporal anti-aliasing, also known as TAA, and FidelityFX CAS, which stands for Contrast Aware Sharpening. Then, they tested both versions of the AMD FSR technology — versions 1.0 and 2.0 — and utilized the “Performance” upscaling mode to gain the highest framerate available. While the AMD FSR 1.0 fell short, offering terrible graphics with visual interference errors throughout, FSR 2.0 surprisingly handled the game much better.

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The website continues to remind readers that the point of the test was not to see if it could run Deathloop “perfectly,” but more could it at least handle the game in some aspect that it could be close to playable.

The initial laptop started with 28fps, but when added with TAA and CAS, it dropped two frames per second to 26fps. While AMD FSR 1.0 improved performance by 22%, pushing the system’s frames per second to 34, FSR 2.0 offered 30fps at 16% increased performance. The test proved successful on the first laptop, improving a 22% increase in performance but offering more capability with both sharpening and anti-aliasing. In contrast, the previous version did not provide the same with a 28% improvement in performance.

The upscaling performance took a drastic hit on a much older laptop with Gen11 graphics from Intel. At the same baseline — 720p resolution and the lowest settings possible — the system could only produce 13fps, as long as TAA was not used. Once adding TAA and CAS to the mix, performance lowered to 11fps. Utilizing the AMD FSR technology, version 1.0 in “Performance” mode increased the frames per second to 15, but when initiating version 2.0, the frames per second dropped to 14fps. AMD FSR 1.0 proved an improvement of 35% on this particular test, and 2.0 produced only a 28% improvement.

The tests proved that AMD FSR 2.0 can work on an old Intel-based laptop but would not make the game completely playable. The site states that FSR 1.0 and 2.0 both worked on the systems, and the real problem was that they were using much older graphics technology that was Intel-based and not meant to run Deathloop. Most errors were chalked up to rendering errors that the system could not resolve.

The website further deduces that the problem is potentially the drivers themselves due to receiving D3D12 error messages in the log files. However, they did prove that with an older Intel system utilizing TAA and CAS, along with FSR 1.0 or the recommended 2.0 version currently, you will be able to see more promising results. The biggest hurdle is Intel correcting the driver issues that Tom’s Hardware believes to be the culprit. Now having FSR work on integrated Intel GPUs means that it should also work fine with Arc graphics and since the first release of XeSS has been delayed, users can enjoy AMD tech on their blue hardware till it releases.

Source: Tom’s Hardware