3DMark just released an update that focuses on benchmarking Intel’s new XeSS Ai upscaling technology on Intel-, AMD-, and Nvidia-based GPUs. The new update is now available, for free, to (almost) all owners of 3DMark Advanced and Professional Editions.
The benchmarking tool is designed to allow users to analyze XeSS’s capabilities using several tools and benchmarking options. This XeSS benchmark lets you see how much faster your GPU is with XeSS, and lets you test XeSS’s various resolution options including Ultra Quality, Quality, Balanced, and Performance mode.
The benchmark itself is fully ray traced, and features lots of shiny materials and objects for XeSS to upscale and manipulate. The GPU-intensive benchmark should provide users with enough detail to adequately check XeSS’ upscaling quality, and is demanding enough on GPUs to provide very low frames per second at native resolution (which will give XeSS the highest potential of increasing frame rates via upscaling).
The XeSS benchmarking application also allows users to measure image quality with a tool called XeSS frame inspector. This tool records several frames of the application’s benchmarking run for the user to see in a still image. Then the user can zoom into any part of the image with the frame inspector, to judge XeSS’ upscaling quality.
Intel teased this 3DMark update almost two months ago in a early demonstration video. But it wasn’t available to all until now (assuming you’re running a paid version of 3DMark).
The XeSS benchmark will be a free update to owners of the 3DMark Advanced Edition and Professional versions, with some caveats. Users who purchased the Advanced Edition after January 8th 2019 will get the update for free. But users who bought the advanced edition before this date will need to buy the Port Royal upgrade to unlock the XeSS update.
For Professional Edition owners, the XeSS benchmark update will be available to everyone who owns a valid annual license of the program. Anyone who owns the older perpetual license version will need to upgrade to an annual license to unlock the XeSS update.
Also, due to ray tracing requirements, you’ll need a modern GPU that supports Microsoft’s Ray Tracing Tier 1.1, Shader Model 6.4, and versions 20H2 of Windows 10 or 11 to run the XeSS feature test.
