Monday, August 15th 2022
Intel Xe iGPUs and Arc Graphics Lack DirectX 9 Support, Rely on API Translation to Play Older Games
So you thought your Arc A380 graphics card, or the Gen12 Xe iGPU in your 12th Gen Core processors were good enough to munch through your older games from the 2000s and early 2010s? Not so fast. Intel Graphics states that the Xe-LP and Xe-HPG graphics architectures, which power the Gen12 Iris Xe iGPUs and the new Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards, lack native support for the DirectX 9 graphics API. The two rely on API translation such as Microsoft D3D9On12, which attempts to translate D3D9 API commands to D3D12, which the drivers can recognize.
Older graphics architectures such as the Gen11 powering "Ice Lake," and Gen9.5 found in all "Skylake" derivatives, feature native support for DirectX 9, however when paired with Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards, the drivers are designed to engage D3D9On12 to accommodate the discrete GPU, unless the dGPU is disabled. API translation can be unreliable and buggy, and Intel points you to Microsoft and the game developers for support, Intel Graphics won't be providing any.
Source:
Intel Graphics
Older graphics architectures such as the Gen11 powering "Ice Lake," and Gen9.5 found in all "Skylake" derivatives, feature native support for DirectX 9, however when paired with Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards, the drivers are designed to engage D3D9On12 to accommodate the discrete GPU, unless the dGPU is disabled. API translation can be unreliable and buggy, and Intel points you to Microsoft and the game developers for support, Intel Graphics won't be providing any.
42 Comments on Intel Xe iGPUs and Arc Graphics Lack DirectX 9 Support, Rely on API Translation to Play Older Games
DX12 / vulkan - Acceptable in some games, and reBAR must be enabled.
DX11 - BAD
DX10 - BAD
DX9 - What is this? I need a dictionary.
Is Xe capable of native DX10 support?
Sadly, i still play a bunch of DX9 titles... how bad would this be for something like Starcraft II, that's already weirdly unoptimised
It performs well when used on linux and can also be used on windows. Seems to me that it could be an effective fallback for intel
Also if the a750 is around 3060 levels then really this should not be that much of a problem maxing out dx9 games even with a deficit.
But if its buggy and inconsistent that will suck, and of course those that seek to play older games at 200 fps etc might not be able to with Intel hardware
A lot of space and design on current GPU's is for older legacy code, too.
Look at how useless RTX cores are for DX9, for example.
One of the biggest sells of PC gaming is that you can still play your back catalogue on modern hardware... Fortunately there's Proton and dgVoodoo 2.
How could Intel mess up so badly, they have been making GPUs and drivers forever.
I will definitely not be a guinea pig for their hardware and software. I would rather pay twice as much for the same performance if everything works perfectly.
Playing old games is not straightforward even on NVIDIA and AMD, but you can usually get everything to work with some tweaks. At least you get native support for the APIs.
And this may be the least of Intel's problems, but it is significant nonetheless.
Still want to buy a arc 770 though so hurry the f up Intel FFS.
This is quite disappointing and would be a complete dealbreaker if DXVK didn't exist.
Anutha day, yet ANUTHA reason to throw moar shade & shame at da Arc, hehehe :D
Perhaps they can salvage something out of this dumpster fire by changing the name to "Achy Breaky".....
Maybe this will get Microsoft to put some work into bringing older APIs translation to dx12 up to snuff, it's not exactly their problem but it's a major blocker for anyone that would want to enter the gpu market that they could solve relatively easily (and might bring advantages to everyone including nvidia and amd)