Intel will no longer support DirectX 9 natively
2 min readIntel will no longer support DirectX 9 natively
Intel will no longer support DirectX 9 natively.
Intel will be removing native support for DirectX 9 from its new Arc discrete graphics and Xe integrated graphics on 12th Gen processors, and going forward Intel will only offer DirectX9 to DirectX 12 emulation support.
Intel recently released an update about DirectX 9 on the support page of its website .
Intel said that it will drop native support for the 20-year-old DirectX 9 graphics API, but it will still provide a certain degree of guarantee – that is, DirectX 9 based applications and games will still work fine through the D3D9On12 interface on Windows 10 and Windows 11.
D3D9On12 is an open source mapping layer developed by Microsoft that works by receiving 3D DirectX 9 graphics commands, which D3D9On12 then converts into DirectX 12 commands.
Here it replaces the GPU driver that normally handles DirectX 9 calls and acts as a bridge between the two technologies.
Microsoft is also very optimistic about the performance of this simulation technology, and believes that D3D9On12 has become a good implementation of DirectX 9.
While performance may not be as good as native DirectX 9 support, the performance is very close, and in some cases is even comparable to native Direct 9.
But this also means that Intel has completely handed over the processing power of DirectX 9 to Microsoft. Intel also says the same on its support page:
Since DirectX is Microsoft property and is maintained by Microsoft, troubleshooting DirectX 9 application and game issues requires submitting any findings to Microsoft so they can include the correct fixes in the next OS and DirectX API updates .
Intel says that dropping native support for DirectX 9 isn’t necessarily bad news.
There are very few games that only run on DirectX 9 these days, and usually support DirectX 9 as well as other newer or even the latest APIs, so these games will still be natively supported by Intel.
There’s no indication yet that AMD RDNA 3 or Nvidia RTX 4000 GPUs will drop DirectX 9.
On the other hand, if you’re still using Intel’s 11th gen and earlier CPUs, native support for DirectX 9 will continue to be retained (provided it’s not used with Arc discrete graphics, and if combined, rendering is likely is handled by the discrete graphics card, not the integrated graphics).
