Meteor Lake iGPUs receive Intel’s XeSS Frame Generation, now without requiring dedicated hardware

As per the post on the Intel XeSS SDK page, the company has now enabled XeSS-FG support for the Meteor Lake architecture. FG stands for Frame Generation, which means that this architecture, which technically does not support XMX acceleration, also supports this technology.

Previously, Intel had mentioned that this technology (Frame Generation) would only work on Intel GPU architectures supporting XMX (Xe Matrix Extensions).

These extensions were present on dedicated architectures (Alchemist and Battlemage), but were also included on the Arrow Lake Arc 100T and Lunar Lake Arc 100T GPUs. And, at least initially, they hadn’t been added to the Meteor Lake series of iGPUs.

Now it appears that Intel has simply removed the XMX requirement and Meteor Lake will support XeSS-FG. Probably, support will be through DP4a instructions, which are used by third-party GPU architectures. After all, XeSS-FG also works on non-Intel GPUs.

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XMX Opcional

According to what was published, Intel removed the XMX requirement. The company specifically listed all Arc-based graphics architectures and clarified that XeSS also works on non-Intel GPUs.

Frame generation in Meteor Lake should offer similar performance and quality to non-Intel GPU architectures. Perhaps this change was necessary, as Intel unified all Arc-based graphics architectures into a single driver version.

This simplifies maintenance and, for users, should reduce the amount of errors. One of the problems reported in some games with the drives is the very large number of video cards they need to adjust to.

In other words, the simplification of architectures, in theory, provides ease for the company and quality for users. However, given Intel’s crisis situation, this may not be confirmed.

There is no mention of whether earlier GPU architectures (prior to Xe-LPG) support FG. This will be discovered with another announcement or when the latest SDK is implemented in real games.

The full list of updates is below:

This release adds XeSS-FG support for Meteor Lake integrated GPUs and resolves issues reported in version 2.1.0:

XeSS-SR:

• Improves error reporting by creating context on very old drivers;
• It corrects rare faults not Vulkan;
• Fixes VUID-VkShaderModuleCreateInfo-pCode-08737 validation error on AMD cards;
• Improvements to keyboard commands, as requested by the community.

XeLL:

• Fixes timestamp resolution error when the application does not send the RENDER_START marker.

XeSS-FG

• Partially resolves the context creation issue to identify whether the device supports XeLL and XeFG, improving XeSS-FG context initialization and load times;
• Fixes errors that led to crashes;
• Allows marking of UNTIL_PRESENT resources without a command list;
• Fix inverted depth initialization flag;
• Fixes out-of-bounds index errors found by GPU-based validation;
• Reduces log spam.

Meteor Lake