Aug. 15 – Native DX9 hardware support has officially disappeared from the Xe integrated graphics solution and A-series Arc Alchemist discrete GPUs in Intel’s 12th generation CPUs. Intel said that all support for DirectX 9 will be moved to DirectX 12 emulation mode.
The simulation will run on the Microsoft “D3D9On12” open source conversion layer. The conversion is performed by sending 3D DirectX 9 graphics commands to the D3D9On12 layer instead of directly to the D3D9 graphics driver. Once the D3D9On12 layer receives the commands from the D3D9 API, it converts all commands to D3D12 API calls. So basically, D3D9On12 will act entirely as a GPU driver and not as Intel’s actual GPU driver.
Microsoft says that this emulation process has become a relatively high-performance implementation of DirectX 9. As a result, the performance can be comparable to native DirectX 9 hardware support.
Therefore, this change to DX9 by Intel seems to be a very good move. Intel can now shift driver development resources to DirectX 11 optimization (which is currently terrible). In addition, Intel will not be affected by the performance impact, DX9 optimization is completely “outsourced” to Microsoft.
According to Microsoft, it will be possible to observe how D3D9On12 performs and see if Nvidia and AMD follow the same path as Intel. Nvidia and AMD also have nearly 20 years of experience with DirectX 9 drivers, and there may be a performance loss in the DX12 emulation layer by comparison.
Previously, Intel only had a DirectX 9 experience on integrated graphics cards, and it did not translate to a higher-performance, solo experience. As such, there are real benefits to Intel moving to emulation on Arc graphics cards worldwide.
