Intel has confirmed that Arc series graphics cards experience performance degradation in DirectX 9 and 11 games compared to current DirectX 12 and Vulkan. The problem is insufficient optimization of the drivers, but it will not be possible to solve it in a short time, so on old Intel Arc games they will still be inferior to AMD and NVIDIA products.
Image source: Intel
The YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips drew attention to the problem, whose authors compared the performance of the Shadow of the Tomb Raider versions for DX11 and DX12 on the Arc A770 video card: in the first case, it presented 38 frames per second, and in the second – all 80. The root of the problem is that DirectX 9, 11 and other legacy APIs work differently than current DirectX 12 and Vulkan. Setting low-level graphics settings on older interfaces is done at the driver level – this greatly slows game developers down. And DirectX 12 and Vulkan offload these tasks to the game engine – the developers themselves do all the low-level optimizations.
Intel will have to work hard to optimize drivers for DirectX 9 and 11, and that will likely take a long time – the company has far less experience with discrete graphics than AMD and NVIDIA, who are well aware of all the features of the old APIs. Last week, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger admitted that there were bugs in developing drivers for discrete graphics cards: you couldn’t just port some solutions with integrated graphics software – they are very different.
–
