Intel’s dropping native support for DirectX 9 games in favor of emulation

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Intel's new Arc graphics cards and Xe integrated graphics on 12th Gen processors will no longer have native support for DirectX 9.

According to a recently updated support page on Intel's website, applications and games based on DirectX 9 can still work through Microsoft, even though the company is dropping support for the 20-year-old graphicsAPI.

You should still be able to play games like Unreal Tournament, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Team Fortress 2, even though modern Intel graphics cards won't have dedicated drivers for them.

There are still issues that will occur, but Microsoft is now responsible for the fixes. If game developers experience graphical bugs, they will have to use Microsoft instead of Intel.

This isn't bad news according to Intel. Only a small number of games are still running on the same code as before, as opposed to the more recent ones. The quality of in-game graphics has come leaps and bounds in the past 20 years, not to mention that it is extremely unlikely that any new games will be built using the latest version of the software. The only reason support has been around for so long is due to the fact that PC gaming hardware is still being used.