A free 29% performance boost! Intel Arc Graphics Modded Driver Enables Native XeSS on SteamOS

According to news from Fast Technology on November 12th, SteamOS had previously added support for Intel's discrete graphics cards, but a key feature was still missing: it was unable to utilize the XMX AI cores on the Arc graphics cards to run the native version of XeSS, and could only revert to DP4a mode.

Recent tests by the YouTube channel ETA Prime show that a modified driver released by the community has unlocked this feature, boosting game frame rates by up to 29%.

It is understood that the driver, named xess-xmx-linux, was released by GitHub user HHHHanasak1. In addition to improving XeSS's performance, it also incidentally unlocks the XeSS frame generation feature, which is only available in the XMX version and is not supported by the official SteamOS driver.

Installation needs to be completed via the terminal in SteamOS Desktop Mode, and activated by adding a command-line argument to the game's launch options.

The data shows that in a comparative test of five games: Cyberpunk 2077, Spider-Man 2, The Witcher 3, Forza Horizon 6, and Red Dead Redemption 2.

Switching from the DP4a version of XeSS to the XMX-accelerated version resulted in performance improvements of up to 29%.

The most typical example is Cyberpunk 2077: At 1440p Ultra quality and XeSS Quality mode, the Radeon B570 achieved an average frame rate of approximately 58 FPS, which increased to 75 FPS after enabling the modified driver.

The other games also saw significant increases, with Forza Horizon 6, Spider-Man 2, and The Witcher 3 showing improvements of 18% to 26% at 1440p with the XeSS Quality setting.

However, the tests also found that this figure is not entirely attributable to XMX. In Red Dead Redemption 2 at its native resolution with XeSS disabled, the modified driver was still 11% faster than the official driver, indicating that it also included other performance optimizations not found in the official SteamOS version.

This test also revealed a problem: when the XMX cores are idle, XeSS in DP4a mode occupies shader resources for upscaling, which in turn takes away computing power from the game rendering itself.

For Radeon users, modifying the driver is a viable workaround. However, official support will still depend on Valve adding XMX acceleration to SteamOS in future system updates.

Source: MyDrivers (Fast Technology). Content is presented with source attribution. Read the original report.