The Intel Arc GPU launch is proceeding less than smoothly to put it lightly, with team blue still yet to release any cards outside of China. Now, it appears that the company has opted to ditch support for DirectX9 with its upcoming pixel pushers and on its 12th Gen Core processors’ integrated graphics chips.
According to a new support article on the Intel website, as highlighted by Twitter user SquashBionic, DirectX 9 games running on Intel Arc graphics cards will use the ‘D3D9On12’ interface rather than run the API natively. The same applies to any chips with Xe graphics running on the company’s current line up of best gaming CPUs, in addition to upcoming Raptor Lake processors. Essentially emulating it through DirectX 12.
While this means that most if not all games that use DirectX 9 should work on the newest Intel graphics silicon, the responsibility for fixing any issues will fall on Microsoft rather than team blue. It’s hard to say how this will affect real-world performance, but there’s no indication that AMD RDNA 3 or Nvidia RTX 4000 GPUs will be adopting a similar approach.
Thankfully, things look decidedly rosier when it comes to newer versions of the API. The Intel Arc A750 GPU can be up to 5% faster than the RTX 3060 in DirectX 12 applications, including the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding, and Hitman 3. This only matters, of course, if the company can bring its cards to market, which isn’t a given at this point in time.