Intel Xe iGPUs and Arc Graphics Lack DirectX 9 Support, Rely on API Translation to Play Older Games

[trsttte]

just curious why not implement dxvk on a driver level?
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

Maybe they don't want to piss off Microsoft, it was already suggested a couple times (like in the recent full nerd interview) and I doubt no one at Intel thought of that before (they even mentioned on the interview something about looking at dx9 on dx12).

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)

 

[phanbuey]

this is what happens when you try to make a compute card a gfx card I guess? seems to be a repeating pattern with this approach.

 

[defaultluser]

Intel Arc performance:
DX12 / vulkan - Acceptable in some games, and reBAR must be enabled.
DX11 - BAD
DX10 - BAD
DX9 - What is this? I need a dictionary.

Reminds me of this good-old trick performed by the Matrox G200 in Open gl games

Matrox G200 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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 done

Shouldn't be a problem. Arc has a lot of other more pressing issues. Price and performance and bugs with modern games first need to be fixed.

True, but it sounds like this affects the igp as well.

 

[GreiverBlade]

that's ... odd ... because even the new generation of "gamers" (no ... not the "Pro" kind ), those that i know are in a phase of nostalgia (no... not their nostalgia) and are playing oldies i did play in end 80s till beginning 2000
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 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 ahah i should test the recently acquired Arc 37..... errr i mean the S3 Virge with that too )


for me that would translate in almost more than half of my Steam library being unplayable and literally 90% of GoG same

 

[efikkan]

...lack native support for the DirectX 9 graphics API
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.

Sadly, i still play a bunch of DX9 titles... how bad would this be for something like Starcraft II, that's already weirdly unoptimised

Or even worse, a less popular title the developers of D3D9On12 (which is MS) haven't tested which may contain hard to find bugs.

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.

I assume it will be powerful enough for most DX9 titles, but what about frametime consistency?

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

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.

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.

What?
Please explain yourself.

It seems wildly optimistic for Intel to expect dx9-era game deva to provide any support for hardware that didn't exist at the time.

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…

for me that would translate in almost more than half of my Steam library being unplayable and literally 90% of GoG same

I think this emoticon would be more appropriate:

 

[GreiverBlade]

I think this emoticon would be more appropriate:

yeah, true, but as i do enjoy sarcasme i laugh bitterly sometime

 

[Jimmy_]

Intel Arc performance:
DX12 / vulkan - Acceptable in some games, and reBAR must be enabled.
DX11 - BAD
DX10 - BAD
DX9 - What is this? I need a dictionary.

hahahah....!

 

[qubit]

No proper retro compatibility? I'll give it a miss, thanks.

 

[eidairaman1]

What a dumpsterfire arc is becoming

 

[80251]

Are any modern games coded to the dx9 standard?

 

[AusWolf]

As for the poll: Of course DX9 is important! Nearly all my favourite games are DX9 and older.

 

[BSim500]

"Is DirectX 9 support still relevant for you in 2022?"

Yes, very much so. I play a lot of older DirectX 5-10 / OpenGL games, often more than new ones. The most popular game on Steam (CS:GO) uses DX9, as do other multi-million sellers on that Top 100 list (eg, Stardew Valley, Terraria, etc). If Intel won't support that, then I'll stick with AMD / nVidia.

 

[jpvalverde85]

Is it relevant the native dx9 support? Intel support can put some guys to work on Dxvk (dx9 to dx12 thru Vulkan), and there you have support, performance will not be an issue as GPUs of old even native will be of considerably lesser grunt.

 

[efikkan]

Is it relevant the native dx9 support? Intel support can put some guys to work on Dxvk (dx9 to dx12 thru Vulkan), and there you have support, performance will not be an issue as GPUs of old even native will be of considerably lesser grunt.

It's more about the quality of support rather than performance.
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.

 

[MikeMurphy]

I suspect ARC can run 99% of DX9 titles at full framerates even with the translation layer.

It's not unreasonable to have bugs on a new architecture with respect to legacy apps.

I don't see the problem.

 

[efikkan]

I suspect ARC can run 99% of DX9 titles at full framerates even with the translation layer.
It's not unreasonable to have bugs on a new architecture with respect to legacy apps.
I don't see the problem.

DX 10 was a major API change over DX 9, it was actually mainly a redesign of the API, and formed the basis for subsequent API versions. The APIs are too different to just translate one API call into another, as graphics APIs are not some simple stateless REST APIs, but instead have complex states which need to be replicated through a lot of bloat when emulating another API. There is no way a such abstraction layer can compare to a proper implementation.

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.

 

[MikeMurphy]

DX 10 was a major API change over DX 9, it was actually mainly a redesign of the API, and formed the basis for subsequent API versions. The APIs are too different to just translate one API call into another, as graphics APIs are not some simple stateless REST APIs, but instead have complex states which need to be replicated through a lot of bloat when emulating another API. There is no way a such abstraction layer can compare to a proper implementation.

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.

In absolute terms though, even with impaired DX9 performance, Arc has enough horsepower to run any DX9 title at good framerates. If my Radeon can run a DX9 title at 400fps, and Arc manages lowly 150fps, then I don't see the issue.

 

[efikkan]

In absolute terms though, even with impaired DX9 performance, Arc has enough horsepower to run any DX9 title at good framerates. If my Radeon can run a DX9 title at 400fps, and Arc manages lowly 150fps, then I don't see the issue.

Look at #39; average FPS is not the biggest concern.