Older Games Now Run More Smoothly On Intel Arc GPUs

Under the "Arc" brand, Intel is gradually expanding its own line of specialized graphics cards. The business recently released a driver update that prioritized DirectX 9 performance, greatly enhancing the performance of older games and apps. Windows's DirectX 9 graphics API is an outdated version that has been replaced by DirectX 12 and Vulkan. However, numerous games and programs still make use of DirectX 9, including Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offense. It is up to Intel's software drivers to convert the older API calls into more up-to-date code since Intel didn't provide complete hardware support for DirectX 9 in its new graphics cards. With the latest upgrade to its graphics drivers, Intel claims that DirectX 9 performance will now be "up to 1.8x times quicker" on average. While average frame rate increases are excellent, the business wrote in a blog post that the improvement in overall experience and fluidity is even better. You can see from the 99th percentile FPS that we have made a relative improvement in CS:GO of almost 2x, and I can attest from personal playing experience that players will immediately notice the change. Funny enough, the Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation layer DXVK, which was largely developed for Valve's Proton compatibility layer, is incorporated into Intel's drivers. It appears that Intel is leveraging DXVK to convert some DirectX 9 API calls to Vulkan code, which the Arc graphics cards fully support. We won't be stopping here; we still have more work to do, Intel added in its blog post. Future drivers will continue our march toward a polished and more performant solution, adding new features for games dependent on legacy APIs and improving the overall driver.