Intel has been quiet lately regarding its upcoming Arc Alchemist GPUs, with rumors swirling if the series will even launch. However, those rumors must be swept away as we now have few details on Intel’s flagship A770 GPU.
Intel just showcased its A770 discrete GPU run Blender Cycles with ray tracing enabled. This happened at SIGGRAPH 2022, where Bob Duffy (Intel Director of Graphics Community Engagement) showcased an Intel Tiger Lake-based system on Arc A770 GPU within a NUC 11 Extreme PC.
Blender Cycles is a render engine that supports CUDA/OptiX for NVIDIA GPU and OpenCL acceleration for AMD GPUs. The upcoming Blender 3.3 LTS update will also support Intel’s oneAPI, allowing Intel GPUs, such as the Arc Alchemist, to take advantage of their own architecture.
The A770 is designed to have a DG2-512 GPU with 512 EUs, 4096 Shading Units, 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, and 32 Xe cores for ray tracing, making it a powerhouse for games. Even though SIGGRAPH is a professional event and not for gamers, the gaming-focused Intel Arc A770 graphics card was used.
This indicates that the Intel Arc cards will also be good for other purposes like professional work and visual 3D artists. Coming to the numbers, the system produced a decent rendering in Blender 3.3 LTS release, using Intel’s oneAPI.
Intel’s Arc Alchemist GPUs are rumored to launch by the end of this year. However, neither the release date nor even the specifications of these graphics cards have been released by Intel as of yet. Don’t leave yet, as this is not the only significant thing from Intel this week.
Intel will use DirectX12 emulation for DirectX9 Titles
Intel has officially discontinued Native DX9 hardware support for Intel’s Xe integrated graphics solutions on 12th Gen CPUs and A-Series Arc Alchemist discrete GPUs.
DirectX9 API is almost 20 years old now; hence, Intel will transfer all DX9 support to DirectX 12 as emulation.
Hence, from this point on, Intel GPUs will no longer come with DX9 API drivers. Instead, a Microsoft open-source conversion layer known as “D3D9On12” will act as a device driver interface for DX9.
Most of the popular games like CS:GO, DOTA 2, and Team Fortress 2 still run on DX9, and although this new emulation won’t be able to produce results, the experience should mostly be the same.
However, Microsoft will have to fix any potential problems, such as graphics glitches or the mapping layer not working.
This move by Intel is indeed smart, as they have no prior experience dealing with DX9 on high-performing discrete GPUs, considering the Arc series is their first-ever dGPU launch.
Seeing as we are talking about DirectX, DXVK has kind off been a hot topic. But, what is DXVK? Well, the technical definition suggests that it is a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9/10/11, which allows running 3D applications.
The more gaming definition(the one that we are interested in) is that DXVK is a Direct3D to Vulkan translation layer used in Proton to help run Windows games on Linux and Steam Deck. This makes DXVK one of the best choices for emulating DirectX calls to Vulkan, helping millions of Linux users worldwide play their favorite games.
About Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in Silicon Valley. It is the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer on the basis of revenue, and is the developer of the x86 series of microprocessors – the processors found in most personal computers (PCs).
Incorporated in Delaware, Intel ranked No. 46 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
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