Why Intel GPUs are performing badly in older titles despite trading blows with the RTX 3060

Intel recently stated that driver enhancements for its Arc GPUs, linked to subpar DirectX 11 and 9 gaming performance, will be an ongoing project with no specific conclusion in sight. In essence, its lack of expertise in the field of discrete GPU drivers will keep its units from being competitive with older APIs for a long time.

This was made very clear by a review from LinusTechTips, who discovered a 50% performance difference between Shadow of the Tomb Raider's DX11 and DX12 versions when playing on an Arc A770. The A770 only managed about 38FPS in DirectX 11, but the frame rate soared to an astounding 80FPS in DirectX 12 mode.

Note: This article is subjective and reflects the opinions of the writer

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What is causing issues with Intel Arc?

The earlier APIs, such as DirectX 11 and DirectX 9, act differently from the more recent ones like DirectX 12 and Vulkan.

When it comes to adjusting and setting up lower-level GPU parameters that users aren't not aware of, the older APIs mainly rely on the GPU driver to handle the heavy-lifting.

In an effort to relieve some additional burden from game developers, this behavior was deliberate. When using these older APIs, driver optimizations have a significant impact on how well a GPU performs in games.

Unlike DirectX 12 and Vulkan, where most of this driver baggage has been shifted to the game engine itself and developers are in charge of handling lower-level optimizations like visual memory allocation, this is a night and day difference (this is why DirectX 12 and Vulkan are referred to as "low level" APIs).

The bad news for Intel is that they have minimal expertise with these discrete graphics APIs (in comparison to iGPUs). Nvidia and AMD, on the other hand, have more than 10 years of combined prowess in the industry and are familiar with all the peculiarities that DX 11 and DX 9 possess.

Tom Petersen from Intel claims that improving speed in APIs like DirectX 11 will always be a "labor of love." Although it is a terrible truth, it is nevertheless a fact.

There are several techniques to optimize GPUs for DirectX 11 and its predecessors, but these improvements take time. Even established businesses like AMD, which have seen significant improvements in DirectX 11 drivers only recently, can attest to this reality.

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Final thoughts

It seems logical to expect that Intel's expertise in integrated graphics would be advantageous. Unfortunately, it hasn't made a difference and, if anything, has made circumstances worse for the organization.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger stated that they made a critical mistake on the driver side of development by believing it could apply its integrated graphics driver stack to its discrete Arc GPUs.

This tactic demonstrated to Intel that, due to the significant architectural differences between its iGPUs and dGPUs, its integrated graphics driver stack was completely unfit to support Intel's significantly more potent Arc GPUs.

Given that the GPU scarcity appears to be gone, PC builders searching for a dependable, high-performing graphics card may decide to continue with Nvidia and AMD. However, Intel claims it is always trying to improve graphics technology across all titles. Making DX11 games will always be a labor of love, according to Petersen.