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
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_G200#Performance
And we al remember how popular Matrox is today? They eventually relented, and did a minigl for the G400 series, but by that point the damage had been doneTrue, but it sounds like this affects the igp as well.
oh well most of them, would ask me to assemble them a retrorig, for real nostalgia feels, with the numerous parts i have at home hehe :laugh: the best horror i made was a Cyrix MII-333GP X CREATIVE LABS CT6610 PERMEDIA 2 recently just for laugh sake (that one was a torture, even for DOS games :laugh: :oops: ahah i should test the recently acquired Arc 37..... errr i mean the S3 Virge with that too :laugh: )
for me that would translate in almost more than half of my Steam library being unplayable and literally 90% of GoG same :laugh:
I call BS on this, no GPU for PCs support DirectX, OpenGL or Vulkan natively, the graphics driver's primary task is to translate theses APIs into the GPU's native API.
Claiming that they can't support DirectX 9 is nonsense, as their OpenGL support already relies on the same underlying features. The real truth is that they don't want to spend resources at maintaining a DirectX 9 implementation.
So apparently Intel doesn't care about people's Steam and GoG game collections.
Don't buy this pile of crap.Or even worse, a less popular title the developers of D3D9On12 (which is MS) haven't tested which may contain hard to find bugs.I assume it will be powerful enough for most DX9 titles, but what about frametime consistency?The chances of bugs here are at least one order of magnitude higher when you have one API emulated through another. Each graphics API are complex state machines which may have many hard to find bugs and edge cases, when you layer software on top of that it just gets much worse.What?
Please explain yourself.Well, the point of having APIs follow a spec is that it should work, if the API is implemented correctly. Games are not developed for a specific GPU architecture, they are developed for one or more graphics APIs. There are thousands of games developed long before current GPUs that still runs fine on brand new hardware.
Ensuring 100% API compliance is something all three GPU makers struggle with, and it's the main reason for driver bugs. But what Intel is doing here is delegating some of the responsibility to MS;
Since DirectX is property of and is sustained by Microsoft, troubleshooting of DX9 apps and games issues require promoting any findings to Microsoft Support so they can include the proper fixes in their next update of the operating system and the DirectX APIs.
So if your DirectX 9 game breaks, then run to MS and cry. This really tells how little they care about their target audience.
And I want to remind everyone who isn't old enough to remember;
Wide adoption of standards and long-lasting compatibility is what made the "(IBM) PC standard" successful, and Intel should know this as they owe a lot of their success to this. Without this the entire industry would be more like Apple, just like the early 80s and late 70s; you bought the wrong computer, so you can't play the new games…I think this emoticon would be more appropriate: :cry:
When implementing something as complex as a graphics API through an abstraction layer you can expect similar quality results to what Wine/Proton achieves in Linux, which means lots of obscure bugs, glitches, artifacts and potentially framerate consistency problems. The results will vary a lot, and whether these are acceptable or not will be up to you to decide.
But we have to remember that the alternative is a card from a competitor which offers support in their driver.
It's not unreasonable to have bugs on a new architecture with respect to legacy apps.
I don't see the problem.
And for those wondering about Intel's excuse about lacking hardware support; well if you can translate it to another API that enables the same feature, then the underlying hardware does support it. All supported APIs are implemented in the driver using the GPU's native API.