Intel has more good GPU news: XeSS 3 will work off the bat in XeSS 2 games

Intel has told us that XeSS 3, its next-gen upscaling tech - which comes with MFG, mirroring NVIDIA's DLSS 4 in that respect - will be backwards compatible with games that support XeSS 2.

As VideoCardz reports, XeSS 3 will be a drop-in affair as confirmed by Intel's Tom Petersen in an interview with PC World on YouTube (see above).

In other words, if a developer has provided support for XeSS 2 in any given game, when XeSS 3 emerges - hopefully early next year - it'll simply work straight off the bat without the dev needing to do anything.

That's obviously good news for those games, and there are quite a few of them at this point - over 50 in fact, so that gets XeSS 3 off to a solid start.

Intel is doing its best to make XeSS 3 a big step forward, and this is another piece of that puzzle. When XeSS 3 and MFG were revealed, we also discovered the good news that it won't be limited to current-gen GPUs in the way that NVIDIA keeps DLSS 4 MFG to only RTX 5000 graphics cards.

XeSS 3 will also be good to go on Arc Alchemist last-gen desktop GPUs, and integrated graphics - not just Xe2, but also Xe1 (eventually, although that won't be in place from the get-go, it should be made clear).

Next-gen Panther Lake chips for laptops (and handhelds) are already looking impressive, with Intel claiming an up to 50% performance boost versus Lunar Lake CPUs (and the latter are already performant mobile chips).