The Intel Arc “Alchemist” graphics architecture was initially created as a forward-facing PC GPU architecture with many modern graphics features, including full DirectX 12 Ultimate support. Curiously, the GPU doesn’t have any hardware support for DirectX 9, though. As game console development (the age of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) stalled, DirectX 9, which was released 20 years ago, continued to power AAA PC titles well into the 2010s. Most e-sports games of the time also had native or fallback DirectX 9 support for those on older GPUs. Since many of the popular e-Sports games may still use DirectX 9, this is a problem for Intel, and with each new Arc GPU driver release, the Intel Graphics team set out to individually optimize DirectX 9 games.

“When one of our more recent API implementations can provide a better experience than a translation layer, we use a hybrid approach, or a combination of API strategies, to take use of translation layers. The end user will receive these improvements in a transparent manner as part of our regular driver distribution procedure. As our DX9 driver develops, the specifics of this solution may change over time “explained Ryan Shrout, Intel’s director of technical marketing. To demonstrate how its optimization efforts translate into far better real-world performance than merely applying DirectX 9 to 12 API translation, the company even released a selection of benchmarks (without game-specific optimization). With new Arc GPU driver updates, the business will continue to expand this list of games.