Intel will use DirectX 12 to support DirectX 9: emulation or translation?

The Santa Clara giant openly confirmed that its Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs offered three perfectly differentiated performance levels, level 1 being recorded over DirectX 12, level 2 under DirectX 12 and Vulkan, and level 3 under DirectX 11 and below. This last level is the one in which these GPUs record the worst results.and it is the one that was giving Intel the most work.

It is perfectly understandable. Those of you who read us daily already know the peculiarities and dependency on driver-level optimizations that DirectX 11 has, in fact AMD itself has had problems with the performance of its graphics cards under 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, though it hasn’t said exactly how it intends to do so. Today, the chip giant has confirmed your plans in everything related to the API DirectX 9, an obsolete solution that is of interest because some classic triple-As that are still very popular use it. I could give you many examples, but among the most important are Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2 and CS: GO.

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

To improve performance Intel will not support DirectX 9 directly, instead it will use a kind of translator identified as “D3D9On12”which will convert and run your entire DirectX 9 workload to DirectX 12. In this way, Intel Xe GPUs, both integrated and dedicated, will no longer support DirectX 9 natively, but rather through that layer of translation, which will allow to simplify the workloads and the management of the pipeline, and its impact at the performance level may end up being minimal.

On the other hand, this should also relieve Intel of a significant workload, allowing it to focus its efforts on improve Arc Alchemist performance in DirectX 11, an API that still has more use than we would like and therefore weighs heavily in comparisons and performance tests. In DirectX 12, Intel Arc Alchemists have already shown that they are capable of 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 seems like a success by all accounts although it has a small negative side, and that is that if some type of incompatibility or problem arises, this would have to be resolved by Microsoft and not by Intel. Still, it’s unlikely, so it doesn’t really matter.