Intel prepares XMX-accelerated XeSS for Valve’s Proton

Intel is preparing to bring XMX-accelerated XeSS support to Valve’s Proton compatibility layer, replacing the slower upscaling path currently used. By tapping the XMX cores in Intel graphics hardware, the planned support is expected to improve upscaling performance for Intel Xe gamers on Linux.

The work comes as Intel promotes XeSS version 3.0, which includes multi-frame generation (MFG). The technology inserts up to three generated frames between two rendered frames, enabling up to a fourfold increase in frame rate. The approach is similar to NVIDIA’s DLSS MFG technology and reflects the growing use of AI-generated frames.

Intel’s latest Panther Lake SoC also brings hardware improvements relevant to these workloads. Each Xe3 core includes eight vector engines, eight matrix engines (XMX), and a dedicated ray tracing unit. Refined thread dispatch and load balancing improve utilization, while the vector and matrix engines double peak FP16 and INT8 throughput compared to Xe2. These changes benefit traditional rendering alongside AI-assisted denoising, upscaling, and frame generation.