Intel’s Arc & Xe GPUs Don’t Feature Native DX9 Support But Can Be Emulated On DX12
On its support page, Intel states that its 12th Generation CPUs with Xe GPUs and Arc discrete GPUs don’t support DX9 natively. This means that while there’s no native support on a hardware level, these chips can still run applications and games based on the DX9 API by emulating it on DX12 via the D3D9On12 interface. News Sources: Bionic Squash, Tomshardware The integrated GPU on 11th generation and older Intel processors supports DX9 natively, but they can be combined with Arc graphics cards. If so, rendering is likely to be handled by the card and not the iGPU (unless the card is disabled). Thus, the system will be using DX9On12 instead of DX9. Since DirectX is property of and is sustained by Microsoft, troubleshooting of DX9 apps and games issues require promoting any findings to Microsoft Support so they can include the proper fixes in their next update of the operating system and the DirectX APIs. Intel has already said that its primary focus at the moment is the 1st-tier application list which includes games based around DX12 and Vulkan APIs. After this, the company plans to move to DX11 and OpenGL titles which fall in the Tier-2 applications, and lastly, we have the legacy titles based on much older APIs such as DX9. There’s a huge list of old games that still have a massive userbase playing them, especially the likes of CS:GO (DX9) which could explain why some users / reviewers have been running into issues when running the game on Intel Arc or Xe GPUs. Intel’s Arc team is definitely hard on work on their driver suite and with the launch approaching next month, we hope that most of the bugs and performance issues that were faced by the Arc A380 at its launch are rid of by then.
