Intel's XeSS 1.3 SDK has been released with a host of new presets, faster performance and improved image quality

Intel's XeSS upscaler might not quite have the developer support of something like Nvidia's DLSS, but it's proven itself quite a competent performer. Now the most recent Intel XeSS 1.3 SDK has been released, and Intel has been keen to show off some significant performance improvements and improved visual quality to boot.

The most recent update adds several new quality presets, including Ultra Quality Plus, Ultra Performance and Native Anti-Aliasing, the last of which being an equivalent to Nvidia's DLAA or AMD's FSR 3 Native setting (via Wccftech). Ultra Quality Plus, meanwhile, is a 1.3x resolution scaling setting, replacing Ultra Quality, which is now moved further down the list to a 1.5x resolution scale.

Ultra Performance is said to be a three times resolution factor mode for, you guessed it, the best performance. However, in order to keep image quality to a maximum, the new SDK makes use of updated AI models that Intel says delivers more detailed reconstruction, better anti-aliasing, less ghosting, and more temporal stability.

In practice, that should mean fewer image artifacts than previous generations of the model, and to demonstrate it the company showed off some brief footage of a scene from Like a Dragon: Ishin! in which a character moves in front of some bamboo matting on a nearby wall. 

While it's not clear which exact preset is being compared to previous versions, the footage shows much less flickering and visual artifacts in the new version, compared to the «before» comparison.

When it comes to performance, Intel has released some figures created by using a modified build of XeSS injected with the updates made in version 1.3, in order to show the difference the new version makes in games that are yet to officially support it. These performance figures were recorded on both the Intel Arc A750 GPU and the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU with the built-in Arc GPU. 

While the performance figures tend to show an improvement of around five to seven fps in most