The actual answer: Because Intel had a major update to XeSS and he wished to compare them now and revisit once FSR 3.1 is out.
Right, it's clearly including FSR as pretty much an afterthought, and barely talks about FSR even in the sections where FSR is being addressed/compared.
I was still confused why it wasn't FSR 3.0 or FSR 2.2.0/1,
but I think the reason may be that FSR is still difficult to just "plug in" wherever you want to test it in supported games. As it says in the article, "
...Users can effectively mod improved versions of Nvidia DLSS and Intel XeSS into games with existing support, simply by swapping a .DLL file in the install directories. " No mention of FSR. Am I not correct that you currently cannot do this with FSR? I know there was a project called CyberFSR to swap DLSS with FSR where desired, but it seems behind and unwieldy, and I don't see much success elsewhere either, even per-game mods.
(*EDIT: I also just looked up info and found out that FSR3.0 was mostly the Frame Generation feature rollout; the upscaler has apparently not been touched yet and is the same as in 2.2. It won't be until 3.1 that the upscaler is updated.)
AMD lists "upgradeability" of FSR DLLs as a feature in the upcoming AMD FidelityFX API and FSR 3.1 release (
as noticed by winjer in a different thread,) but it's still said to be for "certain circumstances" so I don't know what that amounts to?