Intel Drops DirectX 9 Support On Xe, Arc GPUs, Switches To DirectX 12 Emulation

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Native DX9 hardware support is officially gone from Intel's Xe integrated graphics solutions on 12th Gen CPUs and A-Series Arc Alchemist discrete GPUs. To replace it, all DirectX 9 support will be transferred to DirectX 12 in the form of emulation. Emulation will run on an open-source conversion layer known as "D3D9On12" from Microsoft. Conversion works by sending 3D DirectX 9 graphics commands to the D3D9On12 layer instead of the D3D9 graphics driver directly. Once the D3D9On12 layer receives commands from the D3D9 API, it will convert all commands into D3D12 API calls. So basically, D3D9On12 will act as a GPU driver all on its own instead of the actual GPU driver from Intel. Microsoft says this emulation process has become a relatively performant implementation of DirectX 9. As a result, performance should be nearly as good, if not just as good, as native DirectX 9 hardware support.

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