More prompt than its competitors AMD and NVIDIA, Intel gives the impression to turn more completely to DirectX 12 and the next generations of graphics libraries.
The announcement is brief, almost succinct. On its news article pages devoted to the various technologies it implements on its many solutions, Intel explains in a few words that " graphics solutions built into 12th generation Intel Core processors and Intel Arc graphics processors no longer support D3D9 natively " before adding that " DirectX 9-based applications and games can still run via the Microsoft D3D9On12 interface."
Anyone who plays around with technical documentation will obviously understand what this is all about, but for the average person, it probably requires some explanation. Launched 20 years ago by Microsoft, the DirectX 9 library is slowly turning 20. It has been successfully used on many PC games to manage the graphics. However, Microsoft has continued to evolve its tools and has subsequently released DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and, more recently, DirectX 12. Little by little, the old libraries are being abandoned by video game creators and, today, there are no longer any titles that are exclusively DirectX 3 or DirectX 5 for example.
At the same time as this disinterest in the old libraries, game developers who keep a remarkable eye on their titles sometimes change the support so that a game that was once exclusively DirectX 9 is now supported by DirectX 11, for example. However, this is not the case for all of them and there are still many titles that can only run on DirectX 9. On Steam, this is the case for one of the most played games today, Team Fortress 2. If your hardware doesn't support DirectX 9... the game simply won't launch.
For Intel, it is no longer a question of supporting DirectX 9... at least not natively. This means that the Xe-LP and Xe-HPG architectures are basically not capable of running a DirectX 9 game like this Team Fortress 2. However, Intel does not completely draw a line under this generation of games and, thanks to Microsoft which offers an emulation of DirectX 9 commands on DirectX 12 via the Microsoft D3D9On12 interface, it is still possible to run all games. Since we're talking about emulation, some people are worried about a drop in performance, but let's not forget that we're talking about DirectX 9 games and that today most graphics solutions are capable of running them "with their fingers in their nose".
Microsoft itself explains that emulating DirectX 9 commands so that they are recognized by DirectX 12 devices is a " powerful " solution. The editor specifies that the results are " as good as or better than with native support ". Let's hope so for Intel, which, on paper, is probably right to try to move forward when we are rather at the time of DirectX 12, and this, for almost two years.
