With high-end graphics cards getting more expensive every year – sometimes enough to put most people out of business – it's looking more and more like a good idea to stick with your dear old GPUs for a while longer. You might not get the most frames per second in your favorite online games, but you'll manage, right? If only there was a way to get better gaming performance without shelling out tons of money. Luckily for you, Intel has you covered with XeSS (Xe Super Sampling), which can provide a significant boost in FPS and (possibly) image quality.

XeSS, or Xe Super Sampling, is an AI-based upscaling technology designed by Intel to deliver a better, smoother and more consistent gaming experience. But how does it work, and how much of a jump in performance can you expect? Let's find out.

XeSS renders games at a lower resolution and uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to upscale the image to your native resolution. For example, if you play a game at 1440p resolution, XeSS will render all frames at a lower resolution (900p, 720p, 800p, depending on the quality/mode you choose) and artificially enhance the image quality to make it look out as 1440p. The upscaled image is similar to the original rendering, or better, in some cases.

Rendering frames at lower resolutions also gives you a huge performance boost. Since your GPU doesn't have to push as many physical pixels, it can instead focus its horsepower to produce more frames per second. If you've ever been a low-spec gamer, you know that games run faster at lower resolutions (at the expense of image quality). But with XeSS enabled, you get more frames for free without compromising image quality. It's a win-win situation, folks.