DX9 Support Excluded In Intel Arc GPUs

Intel’s Arc A series has been finding itself on the headlines every now and then. Whether it be driver issues or delays, Intel is now trying its best to release these GPUs by Q3 2022.

These GPUs support APIs such as DX12, Vulkan and DX11. While doing so, Intel didn’t add support for old APIs such as DX9.

Over at Intel.com, team blue explicitly states that Intel’s Alder Lake iGPUs and Arc A GPUs no longer support the now outdated API. Although, games can be emulated using Microsoft’s D3D9On12 interface.

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.

Now, Microsoft’s DX9 emulation tool does provide performance nearly on-par with native DX9. Intel has its primary focus on DX12 and DX11 due to its 3-tier optimization technique.

The first tier consists of the games which will run the best on Intel Arc A GPUs, over the DirectX 12 API. Some examples are Cyberpunk 2077, Control and Fortnite.
The second tier includes the games which will run ‘moderately’ on these GPUs, utilizing the DX12 or the Vulkan API.
The third and the most important tier consists of the games which are not well optimized well for Intel’s new GPUs utilizing the DX 11 API or lower. It is to be noted that the pricing of these GPUs will be based on the performance in this, third category.