‘Intel Arrow Lake IGPU includes XMX support for faster XeSS upscaling’

The Intel Arrow Lake processors will reportedly get an ‘Xe-LPG Plus’ IPU. This would be an improved variant of the Xe-LPG architecture of the Meteor Lake with the addition of XMX support. This allows, among other things, faster XeSS calculations to be performed.

It appears that the graphics tile architecture of the Arrow Lake CPUs will probably be called Xe-LPG Plus by Intel. patch notes of the Intel Graphics Compiler, with the update that adds Arrow Lake-S support, so discovered Coelacanth’s Dream. Most of the features appear to be the same as Meteor Lake’s Xe-LPG GPU, with LPG standing for Low-Power Graphics, but the Plus variant reportedly also has XMX matrix engines. These ensure better AI performance and, according to the manufacturer, should enable faster XeSS calculations.

XeSS, just like Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR 2.0, is a technology for temporal upscaling. This means that games are rendered at a lower resolution. Information from the current and previous frames is then used to upscale the image to a higher resolution. That should deliver better frame rates without losing much image quality.

Meteor Lake does not support XMX. It is not entirely clear why, but Coelacanth’s Dream suspects that Intel chose this to save space. Meteor Lake can still use XeSS, but using the DP4a instructions. That works less optimally than with XMX. Intel has not yet confirmed that the Arrow Lake processors actually include XMX support. The fifteenth generation of Core CPUs are expected in the second half of 2024.