let's be direct —

Two months of Intel Arc driver updates begin to fix low performance in old games

Latest beta driver can boost speeds of some DirectX9 games by 50 to 80 percent.

Intel is talking up big performance gains in some old, but noteworthy, games.
Enlarge / Intel is talking up big performance gains in some old, but noteworthy, games.
Intel

In the run-up to the launch of Intel's Arc graphics cards, the company emphasized for months that the cards might not perform well in games that didn't use newer graphics APIs like Vulkan and DirectX 12. The GPUs are actually quite price-competitive with aging midrangers like Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 if you’re playing newer games, but performance in older games is mixed.

For Intel Arc owners attracted to the cards’ price, salvation may come in the form of continued driver updates. Since the October launch of the A770 and A750, Intel has released a handful of driver updates, each of which fixed specific bugs or provided small performance improvements in individual games. But in today's beta driver release (31.0.101.3959, for those keeping track), Intel is offering a "significant" boost in older DirectX9 titles, with frame rates that can improve by as much as 80 percent.

DirectX9 was the graphics API of choice in the Windows XP era, and the Windows XP era lasted for a very long time. The API is also used in still-popular multiplayer games like Counter-Strike: Global OffensiveLeague of LegendsTeam Fortress 2, and Starcraft II, making performance improvements in DirectX9 games particularly noteworthy.

Specific performance numbers. This isn't the difference between playable and unplayable, but they might be noticeable on monitors with super-high refresh rates.
Enlarge / Specific performance numbers. This isn't the difference between playable and unplayable, but they might be noticeable on monitors with super-high refresh rates.
Intel

Because these are pretty old games we're talking about, these performance improvements aren't necessary to hit 60 frames per second on the A770 (though the improvements also apply to the entry-level Arc A380 GPU, which might need the extra help. These increases will mostly benefit competitive players, for whom super-high frame rates and low response times are critical. Some of the increases from the new driver are minor, but at 1080p, Intel says Stellaris and Starcraft II frame rates improved by around 50 percent, while League of Legends improved by 37 percent and CS: Go went up by 80 percent.

Intel had previously said it used a Microsoft-provided translation layer to support DirectX9 games. With these improvements, the company says it's introducing a "hybrid" approach, using Microsoft's D3D9On12 layer "when a better experience can be delivered" and a DirectX-to-Vulkan layer called DXVK when it would improve performance. This makes some sense—Intel can choose a DirectX translation layer based on which is more stable or performant in a given game without needing to go to the trouble of creating a native implementation. (Intel's announcement video mentions a "native implementation," but a readme file spotted by GamingOnLinux now mentions the DXVK license, so it's not "native" in the traditional sense.)

Intel will decide when to switch individual titles over to the Vulkan-based DirectX9 implementation rather than the translated one and will deliver those changes via driver updates along with other improvements.

 

Channel Ars Technica