Cyberpunk 2077 recently received its latest 1.62 patch, which adds support for Intel’s XeSS technology on Arc GPUs, allowing for a massive performance boost.
Night City from Cyberpunk 2077 gets over 70% FPS boost with Intel’s XeSS technology on Arc GPUs
Intel recently informed gamers using an Intel ArcGPU that the Cyberpunk 2077 has gained support for XeSS technology, which allows for a significant performance boost on Arc graphics cards such as the Arc A770 and Arc A750.
XeSS is an AI-based super-sampling technique that reconstructs a low-resolution frame with no antialiasing into a high-resolution frame with full antialiasing. And at a fraction of the cost of high-resolution native rendering.
Good news gamers! Cyberpunk 2077 now runs even faster on Intel Arc GPUs thanks to XeSS. Thanks to the efforts of the developers of CDPR, they implemented the technology and released a patch that significantly increases performance. This comes in handy when playing with ray tracing enabled. We measured up to 71% uplift and topped that sweet 60fps mark with the Intel Arc A750 graphics card.
via intel
The blog post shows the performance increase by comparing running the game with and without Intel XeSS enabled. The test setup consisted of the Intel Core i9-13900K CPU, the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z790 HERO (BIOS 0904), the Intel Arc A750 8 GB Limited Edition GPU, the Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5 DRAM 5600 MHz , and the Corsair MP600 Pro XT 4TB NVMe.
Most of the work to give Intel access to use XeSS technology was done by the CDPR development team. In the current patch for the game, the Intel team saw a 71% increase in frames per second (FPS) when XeSS was enabled using the above specifications. Without the graphics boosting technology, the game ran at 39 fps while it ran over 60 fps at the beginning and maxed out at 67 fps on average. Now XeSS has been set to “Performance” mode, which affects image quality, but even with a quality preset you can still get a lot more performance.
Intel’s XeSS technology is still at version 1.1.0 and has worked its way to become more accessible by more game studios like 505 Games, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Warner Bros. and others. The current version included visual quality improvements in the implemented library of supported PC games. Also, temporal stability has been improved using a new XeSS upscaling model for multi-vendor and integrated GPUs with a separate and more advanced XeSS upscaling model for the Arc series of graphics cards to improve flicker and moiré.
The benefit of Intel Arc GPUs and XeSS technology, especially in games like Cyberpunk 2077, is that users can get a quality and performance boost in a more affordable option than buying an AMD or NVIDIA GPU. Performance might not be as high as NVIDIA and the company’s RTX 40-series GPUs, or AMD’s Radeon GPUs, but if the Intel Arc-series cards cost several hundred dollars less than their decent-performing rivals, it is hard not to look at Intel as a viable option until GPUs can become more affordable for users.
Source: Intel Arc Blog
