Intel is trying to get into the good graces of gamers with its big Panther Lake chipset reveal. In that vein, Intel took more time to explain an update to its two-year-old AI upscaler, XeSS 2. No, we’re not getting XeSS 3. No, Intel hasn’t confirmed what the hell it’s doing with future GPUs. Instead, like Nvidia before, Intel is getting into multi-frame generation to artificially push game frame rates higher. However, unlike Nvidia, Intel isn’t restricting players to its own chips.
(Full disclosure: Intel invited me to its chipset fab in Phoenix, Ariz. Travel and lodging were paid by Intel, but Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition of accepting the trip.)
Multi-frame generation is a word that could create a typhoon of controversy among PC gaming circles with its mere utterance. At its simplest, it’s a process of shoving multiple AI-generated frames in between two frames rendered by the PC itself. Nvidia sold its latest RTX 50-series GPUs on the promise that multi-frame generation would push games well beyond their rasterization performance, or their ability to put a big number into your fps counter when playing games. Naysayers have been calling frame generation “fake frames,” and it’s a moniker that’s not entirely wrong. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went full used car salesman at CES 2025 when he promised a lower-end RTX 5070 graphics card could beat the company’s last flagship GPU, the RTX 4090.
In practice, frame generation makes sense for lower-end devices more than some high-end desktop PC that already has the graphics capabilities to push the utmost pixels. That’s where XeSS 2’s multi-frame gen capabilities could start to change the nature of how we think of lighter PCs or—potentially—supercharge handheld PCs like MSI’s Claw series.
What base fps do you need before frame gen?
Frame generation technology relies on PCs having enough data to help stick the AI-made frames in between the ones rendered by the PC. Common wisdom states that most games want between 45 and 55 fps before you kick in frame generation. This helps eschew problems with odd visual glitches and artifacts, where you’ll find visual discrepancies that weren’t meant to be there. In a roundtable with reporters, Tom Petersen, Intel’s big cheese behind graphics and software, said he was fine using multi-frame gen at framerates as low as 30, which bumps it up at 4x to approximately 120 fps. Intel showed off the upcoming Painkiller reboot with a new performance monitor that can show frame rates before and after frame generation, akin to Steam’s updated performance overlay.
With the quadrupling in frame generation (that means there are four AI frames between each rendered frame), the game was running at around 150 fps on a pre-production version of Panther Lake with 12 Xe3 GPU cores, on a reference platform running at 45W. Frame generation creates latency that discerning players can feel and see. This is due to the nature of the technology, since it has to know the next frame in a sequence to insert the AI-generated frames between them. Petersen said the latency could be more, depending on the game and framerate you’re playing at, but it will be down to users whether they opt in or not.
“There are a whole bunch of technologies that have not been announced that could make that better, but right now you can see some just turn off frame gen,” Petersen said. He later referred to potential technology that would use AI to predict mouse clicks, which could potentially allow the game to artificially remove the sensation of latency without removing it altogether. In the future, there’s an opportunity for games to have predictive frame gen that kicks in only in certain moments where gamers won’t feel the impact of latency as much. He even went as far as to say frame rates closer to 30 would actually be better than doing frame gen at higher frame rates, as the latency isn’t as noticeable at lower frame rates as higher frame rates. That being said, I spoke to others at Intel who may still recommend at least 45 fps before enabling multi-frame generation. Your mileage may vary.
I ran through the Painkiller demo at around 50 fps, which turned into around 200 fps on-screen playing at 1080p. The game is as dark and gray as an older Xbox 360 title when we all somehow thought Gears of War looked great. It was more difficult to spot issues with textures or geometry through all the grime. However, the fire effects—which previously posed problems for Intel’s 2x frame gen technology—seemed closer to how it would look without using upscaling or frame generation.
Panther Lake chips tuned for gamers
Petersen wasn’t afraid to share his opinion regarding Nvidia’s multi-frame gen beholden to its latest RTX 50-series of GPUs. “Trash,” he called it under his breath. He’s half-joking, maybe, but Intel now sees itself as an underdog fighting a behemoth; it’s allowing itself to act scrappy. Still, what’s more important is how well its Panther Lake chips can perform in gaming scenarios before you enable any AI options. Intel claims it has optimized power delivery on the CPU and GPU to reduce stuttering in games.
XeSS 2’s multi-frame gen isn’t the kind of technology that makes expensive hardware better. Instead, it offers more options for lower-end systems. XeSS 2 remains hardware agnostic, meaning it can run on any device, whether it has an Intel or AMD chip inside. XeSS 2 works on two different kernels for AMD and Intel devices, and on AMD-powered systems, it requires a compatibility layer that will make the upscaler work slightly worse than on Intel’s chips.
Intel is now the only major U.S. chipmaker still developing hardware-agnostic AI upscaling for PC. At the same time, XeSS is still lagging behind the competition in terms of supported games. AMD has turned its attention to the latest version of FidelityFX Super Resolution, or FSR 4. The upgrade over FSR 3 and 3.5 has allowed upscaled games to look less muddy with sharper details in both the foreground and background. AMD relegated FSR 4 to its latest Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs, as in all those currently using RDNA 4 microarchitecture. AMD recently claimed its latest AI upscaling drivers are available in more than 85 titles. Nvidia’s latest version of its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS 4) AI upscaler is currently available in more than 175 games, according to the company.
In May, Intel said XeSS is available in more than 200 games, but if you’re regularly playing the latest titles, it can be a crapshoot which games support Intel’s upscaling and which don’t. Intel obviously hopes more developers sign on once they see what XeSS 2’s multi-frame gen can do. XeSS multi-frame gen should be available to some games in the future, though players may need to use Intel software to enable it to override on games that are already compatible with Intel’s upscaler.