Intel has announced that its Arc GPUs now work better with older games. The new drivers will improve performance for games like Overwatch, Gears of War 4, and Forza Horizon 4 on systems with an Intel Core i5-2500K or higher processor. “We’re excited to deliver this update as it will provide a significant boost to gaming performance for our customers,” said Jason Ziller, general manager of Intel’s Graphics and Gaming Group. “Arc is the most advanced graphics architecture in the world and we are committed to making sure our customers have the best possible experience when playing their favorite games.” The new drivers also include support for DirectX 12, which is becoming more popular as a gaming platform. ..
DirectX 9 is an older graphics API in Windows, which has been superseded by technologies like DirectX 12 and Vulkan. However, there are still many games and applications that use DirectX 9, such as Counter Strike: Global Offense and Team Fortress 2. Intel didn’t build full hardware support for DirectX 9 into its new graphics cards, so its up to Intel’s software drivers to translate the older API calls into modern code.
Intel has now updated its graphics drivers to improve DirectX 9 performance, with the company promising “up to 1.8x times faster” average FPS. The company said in a blog post, “while average frame rate increases are awesome, the improvement in overall experience and smoothness is even better. If you look at the 99th percentile FPS, you’ll see that our relative improvement is over 2x in CS:GO and I can tell you from first hand playing experience that gamers will notice the difference immediately.”
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Funny enough, Intel’s drivers contain code from DXVK, the Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation layer primarily created for Valve’s Proton compatibility layer. It looks like Intel is using DXVK to translate some DirectX 9 API calls to Vulkan code, which is fully supported by the Arc graphics cards.
Intel also said in its blog post, “we won’t be stopping here; we still have more work to do! Further improvements for games based on legacy APIs and general driver enhancements are on their way and future drivers will continue our march to a refined and more performant product.”
Source: Intel ARC
