Wednesday, December 7th 2022
ICYMI, Intel Improved DirectX 9 API Performance for Arc "Alchemist" GPUs Spanning Several Popular Game Titles
Intel Arc "Alchemist" graphics architecture was originally developed as a forward-facing PC GPU architecture with many of the contemporary graphics technologies, including full DirectX 12 Ultimate support, however, the GPU curiously lacks hardware support for DirectX 9. Released 20 years ago, DirectX 9 continued to power AAA PC titles well into the 2010s as game console development lagged (the era of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3), and most e-sports titles of the time included either native or fallback DirectX 9 support for those on older GPUs. This is a problem for Intel, as many of the currently-popular e-Sports titles may still use DirectX 9, and so the Intel Graphics team set out to individually optimize DirectX 9 titles with each new Arc GPU driver release.
While Arc GPUs lack DirectX 9 support, foolproof API translation technologies exist, which convert DirectX 9 API instructions into DirectX 12. This is not fundamentally unlike how 32-bit applications work on 64-bit Windows (using WOW64 machine-architecture translation). This, however, requires per-game optimization to ensure any engine-level special features are correctly translated. With the latest 101.3959 Beta drivers, Intel optimized popular DirectX 9 titles "League of Legends," "Counter Strike: Global Offensive," "Starcraft 2," "Payday 2," "Guild Wars 2," "Stellaris," "NiZhan," and "Moonlight Blade." The company seems to be going about this the smart way, by relying on market analysis for selecting the games in need of optimization (understanding what DirectX 9 games are still being played).
"We use a hybrid approach, i.e., a combination of API techniques, to take advantage of translation layers when a better experience can be delivered using one of our more modern API implementations. These improvements will be delivered transparently to the end user through our normal driver distribution process. The details of this implementation may change over time as our DX9 driver evolves," said Ryan Shrout, the technical marketing head at Intel. The company even provided a selections of benchmarks to show how its optimization efforts translate into much better real-world performance, than simply applying DirectX 9 to 12 API translation (without game-specific optimization). The company will continue to add more titles to this list with future releases of its Arc GPU drivers. Below is a video presentation detailing these optimization efforts.
Source:
Intel Arc blog
While Arc GPUs lack DirectX 9 support, foolproof API translation technologies exist, which convert DirectX 9 API instructions into DirectX 12. This is not fundamentally unlike how 32-bit applications work on 64-bit Windows (using WOW64 machine-architecture translation). This, however, requires per-game optimization to ensure any engine-level special features are correctly translated. With the latest 101.3959 Beta drivers, Intel optimized popular DirectX 9 titles "League of Legends," "Counter Strike: Global Offensive," "Starcraft 2," "Payday 2," "Guild Wars 2," "Stellaris," "NiZhan," and "Moonlight Blade." The company seems to be going about this the smart way, by relying on market analysis for selecting the games in need of optimization (understanding what DirectX 9 games are still being played).
40 Comments on ICYMI, Intel Improved DirectX 9 API Performance for Arc "Alchemist" GPUs Spanning Several Popular Game Titles
Cut the crap Intel.
In what fucking universe do you think Intel - one of the most rotten, exploitative and corrupt companies around is run by anti-capitalists?
What you mean is market economy where "the government" intervenes to stop the likes of Intel (everyone really) from achieving a monopoly or a building a cartel.
Intel has been making GPUs and GPU drivers forever now, they just messed up as usual, usually they just bribery, or sue their competitors to ensure their dominant position. Intel big as it is should've crushed both nVidia and AMD in both GPU and CPU, they get no sympathy from me.
AMD and nVidia are just as bad, they both fucked us and will continue to do so.
Optimizing CS:GO so it will get the same 300 fps so you can try to brag to people on forums about how much it matters is what that games user base and market expect.
Now if you want to play neverwinter nights 1 are people going to bitch? No it works and plays just fine graphics hardware has come so far that even translation runs it fast enough.
That`s a good one.
It really is.
One of my favorite DX9 games is Dragon's Dogma. It's definitely a bit of an underrated gem that didn't get too much attention on release, from what I know.
I already use DXVK to run it better on my laptop (Xe 80EU), which actually works very well. In fact, DXVK seems to work better than whatever Intel's official solution is.
At least the drivers are getting better, that's what matters imo.That's very true and all great points. Modern graphics can also introduce glitchs for example by running way too fast but those kinds of things are usually not hard to solve. And not having Dx9 support has some advantages like reducing the bloat and overhead the drivers have to deal with - though having things work is better of course.
About the double translation from Dx6-8 to Dx9 I don't think that's a thing, the api has some kind of backwards compatibility or something, but if you're going that far back, you're algo going to run into any sort of other issues anyway.
EDIT: Oh scratch that, just watched the video and their explanation reeks of cherry picked games with proper implementation and everything else translated. It's a nice effort, but a shamefull way to do buziness and if the long term has little chance of catching up to the thousands of different existing games without becoming a giant rock to bury their drivers under.