The Santa Clara giant openly confirmed that its Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs offered three perfectly differentiated levels of performance, with Level 1 recorded over DirectX 12, Level 2 under DirectX 12 and Vulkan, and Level 3 under DirectX 11 and below. This last level is where these GPUs perform worst.and it was he who gave Intel the most work.

It’s completely understandable. Those of you who read us daily already know the peculiarities of a dependency on driver-level optimizations that DirectX 11 has, in fact AMD itself has had problems with the performance of its graphics cards under the said API, despite all the experience and all the technology on which its Radeon solutions are based.

Intel has promised to improve the performance of its Arc Alchemist graphics solutions under DirectX 11 and earlier APIs, although it hasn’t said exactly how it plans to do this. Today, the chip giant confirmed it your plans in everything related to the DirectX 9 API, an outdated solution which is interesting because some classic triple A’s that are still very popular use it. I could give you many examples, but the most important ones are Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2 and CS: GO.

API of the most played titles on Steam. Source: Linus Tech Tips.

To improve performance, Intel will not support DirectX 9 directly, instead using compiler type marked as “D3D9On12”which will convert and run your entire DirectX 9 workload to DirectX 12. In this way, both integrated and dedicated Intel Xe GPUs will not support DirectX 9 natively, but rather through this translation layer, allowing for a simpler workload and channel management, and its impact on performance levels can be ultimately minimal.

On the other hand, it should also relieve Intel of a significant workload, allowing it to focus its efforts on improve the performance of Arc Alchemist in DirectX 11, an API that has more and more usage than we’d like, and therefore carries a lot of weight in benchmarks and benchmarks. In DirectX 12, Intel Arc Alchemists have already shown that they are capable of offering very competitive performance, although we imagine that Intel will also continue to introduce optimizations and improvements to maximize the performance of its graphics cards at all levels.

Use a translation layer to convert DirectX 9 to DirectX 12 It looks like a success under any circumstances, although there is a small downside to this, that if there is any type of incompatibility or problem, this will have to be solved by Microsoft and not from Intel. Still, it’s unlikely, so it doesn’t really matter.