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Video performance demo Intel Arc Alchemist A750 primarily focused on games using the DirectX 12 graphics engine. Here, the Arc Alchemist A750 outperformed Nvidia’s RTX 3060 graphics card, but there is no such trend when comparing games using the old DirectX 11 and DirectX 9 graphics APIs.
It turns out that Intel Arc graphics cards work best when using modern graphics APIs, the so-called “low-level APIs”, which allow games to interact more closely with the GPU.
Supported Games DirectX 12 can work effectively with desktop Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards, and games that use legacy APIs rely more on driver-based resource management and software that communicates between games and graphics hardware. In a discussion of this issue, Intel’s Zachary Hill says that “there’s still a lot of driver work to be done.”
The positive trend for Arc graphics card owners is that future iterations of drivers can and will improve the performance of Intel’s discrete graphics solutions. This has recently been proven by AMD, which over the past few months has released optimized drivers for games under DirectX 11 and OpenGL.
Improving performance in games that use legacy APIs is a clear priority for Intel developers, so we can expect Intel Arc A Series GPUs to offer better performance in these games as drivers are updated.
The negative factor for Intel is that many modern games continue to use DirectX 11, for example – God of War, Days Gone and Stray. Demanding players will not ignore low performance DirectX 11and if Intel can’t solve its performance problems with deprecated APIs in the near future, consumers will simply buy graphics cards from competitors.
Intel is well aware that poor performance in DirectX 11 and DirectX 9 is a problem, and they know that the solution to this problem is redesigned drivers. Given enough time and resources, Intel engineers should be able to fix the flaws in their current Arc Alchemist drivers, making their products more competitive with AMD and Nvidia graphics cards.
Needless to say, Intel has been very open with its Arc graphics cards. Although the launch was delayed than most consumers expected, Intel is clear about its current capabilities and plans for the future. More information about Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards is expected in the near future.
