I have an issue with XeSS and it makes it hard for me to say that it's actually better than FSR.
Hold on- hear me out first.
The only reason to ever use upscaling is for a performance uplift. Personally, I find XeSS often just reduces performance until you go down to either quality or balanced mode. This makes makes the ultra quality, the ultra quality plus and the native mode frankly pointless. Either the performance is just bad (native) or the fps "increase" is so minimal its not worth the trade off of having a softer, more blurred image than just playing natively.
This isn't the case with FSR. To get the equivalent fps from XeSS as you would from FSR, you often have to take it down a tier or two. For example, on my XTX, XeSS balanced performs roughly the same as FSR quality mode. This means that you're having to upscale from a smaller render resolution and this is almost always worse looking than using FSR when comparing them at a similar performance level.
Intel knows this though and it's why they've tried to hide this fact by changing the naming of the existing render ratios and adding more at the top of the stack like i mentioned above.
XeSS is way over hyped, i don't think anyone praising it actually uses it and if they are, they more than likely didn't need to upscale to reach an acceptable performance level anyway.
And no, an upscaler cannot and will never look better than a *competent* native AA solution- it's quite literally impossible.
Of course I'm not taking about people with actual intel GPUs though because there's only about 7 of them, none of which I've met yet.