Intel is slowly building up its own line of dedicated graphics cards, under the “Arc” brand. The company recently pushed a driver update focused on DirectX 9 performance, giving older games and apps a big boost.

DirectX 9 is an older graphics API in Windows, which has been superseded by technologies like DirectX 12 and Vulkan. However, there are still many games and applications that use DirectX 9, such as Counter Strike: Global Offense and Team Fortress 2. Intel didn’t build full hardware support for DirectX 9 into its new graphics cards, so its up to Intel’s software drivers to translate the older API calls into modern code.

Intel has now updated its graphics drivers to improve DirectX 9 performance, with the company promising “up to 1.8x times faster” average FPS. The company said in a blog post, “while average frame rate increases are awesome, the improvement in overall experience and smoothness is even better. If you look at the 99th percentile FPS, you’ll see that our relative improvement is over 2x in CS:GO and I can tell you from first hand playing experience that gamers will notice the difference immediately.”

Funny enough, Intel’s drivers contain code from DXVK, the Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation layer primarily created for Valve’s Proton compatibility layer. It looks like Intel is using DXVK to translate some DirectX 9 API calls to Vulkan code, which is fully supported by the Arc graphics cards.

Intel also said in its blog post, “we won’t be stopping here; we still have more work to do! Further improvements for games based on legacy APIs and general driver enhancements are on their way and future drivers will continue our march to a refined and more performant product.”

Source: Intel ARC