THE CRUNCH
An AI developer has ported NVIDIA's DLSS 5 neural rendering to Intel's Xe architecture, running the technology on the Arc 140V integrated graphics in a Lunar Lake system. The project, titled 'dlss-nr-on-intel', fully reimplements the DLSS 5 U-Net model and runs it on the Intel XMX units via a Vulkan extension. The developer credits AI agents for much of the work, including the generation of a hallucinated driver bug.
The port is not a simple wrapper but a full reimplementation of the 71-block U-Net model, running entirely in FP16 with FP32 accumulation because the Xe2 architecture does not support FP8. The developer tested the implementation on three fighting games, including Tekken 7, but the performance is extremely limited. Running Tekken 7 at 640x360 resolution, the Arc 140V struggles to reach 10.5 frames per second. The DLSS 5 pass itself takes around 412 milliseconds in full HD, meaning the maximum frame rate would be approximately 2.4 FPS even if the game rendered instantly.
The visual results vary by game. The DLSS 5 model is trained to produce a photorealistic look, which improves the detail in Mortal Kombat 1 and Tekken 7 but clashes with the stylised anime aesthetic of Dead or Alive 5 Last Round, making characters look older and less appealing. The project is currently limited to Linux, though the developer intends to adapt it for Windows. While too slow for gameplay, the technique might be useful for photo modes where a single frame can be processed at leisure.