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Based on recent reports, Intel's newest Arc drivers deliver up to twice the performance in games running on legacy APIs like DirectX 9, 10, and 11. Intel's engineers effectively solved the single biggest drawback of the Arc Alchemist GPUs within a few months after they hit shelves.
This move is commendable, bringing the graphics cards closer to the RTX 3060 in terms of overall performance. Team Blue has promised further performance uplifts for other games based on legacy APIs in the future. Thus, they are turning out to be a worthy option to consider over Team Green and Red GPUs.
Installing the new Arc drivers might feel like downloading a new graphics card from the internet. Thus, the chief question is how did Intel engineers achieve this feat. Let's try to answer this.
Intel's Arc drivers are relying on Valve's tech for performance uplifts
When the Arc Alchemist A770, A750, and A380 GPUs dropped, they were found to be far slower in legacy API-based games like League of Legends, Starcraft 2, and CS: GO.
This was chiefly because Intel's GPUs did not have the code to interpret legacy APIs. Hence, they relied on translation layers to run these games, which resulted in a performance loss.
While the new drivers still rely on translation layers, they have progressively improved. The company has moved from using Microsoft's DirectX 12 emulation tech, called the D3D9On12 mapping layer, for running older games to using Steam's DXVK translation layer.
This allows the DirectX9 code to be translated into the open-source Vulkan API that Intel Arc GPUs can interpret. Earlier, the legacy API code was getting converted into DirectX12 code, resulting in a higher FPS drop.
However, Intel has notified the community that it will not use DXVK in every game. Arc drivers will be utilizing a hybrid model and might rely on DirectX 12 emulation if that proves to be faster in certain scenarios. Interestingly, Intel is not the first to begin using DXVK in their Arc drivers. Previously, Nvidia implemented them in their RTX 40 series drivers.
More info on translation layers and why Intel is using them
It's worth noting that translation layers are not an ideal solution to run older games. However, the development of translation layers and optimization for games is far quicker.
Intel was in a hurry to churn out as much performance as possible from its GPUs without delaying its products for too long. Thus, the translation layers were an effective solution Intel needed for its first-gen products.
Despite the added performance benefits, Intel Arc GPUs still trail their AMD and Nvidia counterparts that come with dedicated drivers for running DirectX 9 games. These new drivers are a step up from using the emulation layers on Linux systems as well.
In its blog post, Intel did not mention that it's utilizing DXVK tech to power these performance uplifts. However, according to a report from Gaming On Linux, it's evident that the company is relying on Valve's technology to convert code from DirectX 9, 10, and 11 to Vulkan.
