Intel withdraws native support for DirectX 9 from Arc and Xe graphics

Intel’s long-awaited Arc GPUs are finally here but along with it some news for fans of older games. It looks like Intel will no longer be natively supporting DirectX 9 (DX9) on Arc and Xe dedicated GPUs and integrated graphics on 12th Gen processors.

As reported by The Verge, Intel has quietly announced that it’s switching from hardware support for DX9 on Arc and Xe to emulation courtesy of DirectX 12 (DX12).

12th generation Intel processor’s integrated GPU and Arc discrete GPU no longer support D3D9 natively. Applications and games based on DirectX 9 can still work through Microsoft* D3D9On12 interface.

What does that actually mean? In theory, nothing, at least for the moment. What it does is immediately shift responsibility for DX9 support from Intel over to Microsoft, and as such, any support issues. D3D9On12 is listed on GitHub for those who want to find out more about it. There won’t be dedicated driver support for the remaining popular DX9 games, of which there are quite a few, though not a huge number that relies entirely on DX9. But Intel doesn’t currently envisage any issues for folks to play those titles using Arc or Xe graphics.

It’s important to also point out this only affects the Arc line of GPUs and 12th Gen processors with Xe integrated graphics. 11th Gen Intel chips have native support for DX9 and that isn’t going away. Intel does point out, though, that when paired with an Arc GPU, you will lose that support unless you tell your system to use the integrated graphics instead.

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.

All fingers crossed that things continue to operate as planned.

via The Verge

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