Latest Intel Arc drivers double its DirectX 9 performance, bringing it closer to the RTX 3060

Intel Arc drivers are known to be notorious in terms of harnessing a graphics card's full potential and stabilization issues. However, things could change as the new drivers are capable of delivering almost twice the performance of the current drivers in DirectX 9 games.

Upon launch, Intel Arc GPUs could not run DirectX 9 titles natively and would be emulated on the graphics cards, causing a significant performance difference. While the same GPU would get very close to the RTX 3060 in DirectX 12 titles, it would fall far behind when running Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, for example.

However, with the new v3953 drivers, which are now available for download, performance in Counter-Strike has increased by almost 1.79 times. While the graphics card can only hit 177 FPS in the game while running on the initial v3490 drivers, it delivers more than 315 FPS.

Apart from CS:GO, other older games like League of Legends and Starcraft 2 also benefit largely from these new drivers.

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Intel Arc drivers seem promising in uplifting the A750 ad A770 from performance issues

Performance on v3953 drivers compared to numbers obtained on v3490 (Image via Intel)

The new drivers are specially tailored towards improving performance on legacy APIs. However, with these updates installed, gamers can also enjoy smoother gameplay.

The technology company shared performance benchmarks while running the titles in both 1080p and 1440p, and the jumps are significant.

While CS:GO delivered around 179 FPS at QHD, the card hit approximately 317 FPS with the new drivers. 1080p numbers also had a similar jump from around 117 FPS to 318 FPS. The 1% low numbers increased by over 200% with the new Arc drivers installed.

Starcraft 2, another legacy game, also saw a massive jump in its framerate. While the card can output up to 164 frames in the game with the older v3490 drivers, it is now capable of delivering 243 frames.

Stellaris, too, saw a massive jump in 1080p gaming with the new Arc drivers. From around 80 FPS on the older v3490 drivers, the framerate has currently jumped to 125 FPS.

Framerate comparison between v3490 and v3953 drivers (Image via Intel)

Thus, gamers can expect anywhere between a moderate increase in framerates to almost double the original performance with the new Arc drivers, depending on the game they are being tested in. In fact, it might almost feel like a new graphics card has been installed.

These results were derived from a pretty high-end test bench. Intel used its Alder Lake flagship, the Core i9 12900K, an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard, and 32 GB of dual-rank DDR5-5600 CL36 memory.

However, the results derived from the Intel Arc A770 were shared online, and all Intel Arc Alchemist GPU users can expect a similar performance bump. The list includes the Arc A750 and the A380 graphics cards.

Intel has promised further performance improvements on legacy APIs. Thus, with future updates, we can expect more performance gains in DirectX 9, 10, and 11-based games.