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XeSS on AMD cards - how well does it work?

gjbf1

gjbf1

gjbf1

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Any AMD owners using XeSS? From what I've read it's closer the DLSS than FSR for image quality, but offers less of a FPS gain than DLSS. Is that accurate? What have your experiences of is been like?
 
Pretty sure the very best image attainable is exclusive to ARC cards.

"XeSS is an upscaler with similar performance to AMD's FSR2 and NVIDIA's DLSS, and it works on any vendor's recent graphics processor, albeit best on Intel's own Arc GPUs" According to hothardware.

I am sure there is something more official out there.
 
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Cyber-Mav said:
Xess is better than fsr in some situations. Also why didnt you watch the video if you want answers to you question?
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Was at work so unable to watch a 22 min YouTube video ;⁠-⁠).

I was just wondering if it brought AMD back into closer contention in upscaling if it worked better than FSR (like DLSS). The Asus cashback deals on the 79s has me tempted.

It seems that it doesn't work better on Arc/XMX but still well on Nvidia or AMD cards.
 
gjbf1 said:
I was just wondering if it brought AMD back into closer contention in upscaling if it worked better than FSR (like DLSS). The Asus cashback deals on the 79s has me tempted.
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Aren't all the cashback deals finished? I think the GPU cashback ended on the 24th of June, and the rate my gear cashback ended at the end of June?
 
Pulseammo said:
Aren't all the cashback deals finished? I think the GPU cashback ended on the 24th of June, and the rate my gear cashback ended at the end of June?
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You're right. The cashback tag is still showing on the ocuk website but its over, just the redemption period now.
 
XeSS is strictly worse for all cards except Intel ones, and even then the lower end ones have questionable results (like the A380).

First of all, let's start with performance, because it's clear cut - it's completely abysmal for anything other than the highest end cards because the performance penalty is many times greater than FSR. The worse your card, the worse the result, and in fact it's so bad that in some cases it reaches the performance of native (but with the lower quality of reconstructing from a lower res).

Secondly, qualitatively I will mostly speak about Cyberpunk because I put the most time into it there. Compared to FSR2 it has much more obvious ghosting (and blurring) but in return the edge-aliasing is less evident (maybe I will post example tomorrow). Also compared to FSR2 it has more artifacts during specific sequences as it relates to distant rendering & also the way it interacts with depth of field (once I re-play the game maybe I'll capture it; one example is in the Ghost Town mission once you meet with Boz at the end - save beforehand and test with FSR vs XeSS and you'll see what I mean).

For me, I encountered many more drawbacks with XeSS than FSR2 so I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't better, but I'd also add that in the comparisons I've seen done by sites or on youtube I've seen very superficial analysis and they didn't pay attention to all these things. So from the press (and random comments who are also just parroting these reviews) you'd think it's a lot better but it's not true at all. And that's for me just on quality, because if I needed extra performance then it wouldn't enter the discussion at all and that's on an RX 6800. If you're on something lower than that then just forget it.
 
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XeSS when runnon an Intel GPU looks better than fsr2. But I'm not sure how much worse it looks on non Intel GPUs. There must be some difference because they do operate differently

AMD is likely to do the same thing with FSR3, where FSR3 operates more like fsr2 on non AMD GPUs and the upgraded visuals and frame generation is exclusive to AMD GPUs

Despite AMD trying to push open source, their hand is being forced because their open source image reconstruction has the worst image quality on the market and it's not even close
 
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gjbf1 said:
Thanks. What was the conclusion?
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FSR and DLSS offer the biggest and most similar performance benefits.
XESS offers less performance, but often higher quality visuals than FSR.
XESS and FSR quality differences are game dependent, but DLSS always wins.
FSR performs similarly on everything.
XESS performs significantly worse on non-Intel GPUs.

Conclusion:
Intel: use XESS, but check if FSR offers higher performance
NVIDIA: use DLSS
AMD: use FSR, but check if XESS offers better visuals
 
Tetras said:
FSR and DLSS offer the biggest and most similar performance benefits.
XESS offers less performance, but often higher quality visuals than FSR.
XESS and FSR quality differences are game dependent, but DLSS always wins.
FSR performs similarly on everything.
XESS performs significantly worse on non-Intel GPUs.

Conclusion:
Intel: use XESS, but check if FSR offers higher performance
NVIDIA: use DLSS
AMD: use FSR, but check if XESS offers better visuals
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Thank you.

Cyber-Mav said:
you really need to watch that video i linked to, it shows it all in detail. you will understand when you see the side by side comparisons and zoom ins.
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Yes I planned to last night, but then my daughter got I'll.
 
I was playing around with settings in Witcher 3 and XeSS looked pretty smooth. I'm not sure if that's an indication of advances in the software or placebo on my behalf? There's no FSR3 option to compare to on this game, only FSR2 which is also pretty good.

It really starts to feel like the generational GPU hardware advances are in the process of being superseded by software advances.

P.s. I'm using 7900XT & 5900x.
 
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Generally XESS is worse than FSR2 on non Intel cards, but there can be exceptions depending upon the implementation. Cyberpunk seems to be one of these according to a couple of articles I've seen.
 
Dirk Diggler said:
I was playing around with settings in Witcher 3 and XeSS looked pretty smooth. I'm not sure if that's an indication of advances in the software or placebo on my behalf? There's no FSR3 option to compare to on this game, only FSR2 which is also pretty good.
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It was awhile ago I watched it, but I think Witcher was the main game that he said had better visuals versus FSR.
 
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