Graphics API calls have evolved along with ditto cards, adding new technologies and new levels of performance every few years. This is used by games, which adopt and integrate new technologies to visually deliver much better images to our eyes. However, it seems that after years the DirectX 9 support in graphics cards, it could certainly say goodbye in future models that will be released.
It’s been over a decade since we saw the jump to DirectX 11, so worrying about a game’s performance under DirectX 9 shouldn’t be an act of worry. However, there are many games in the Steam library or simply installed on our PC that use this API. Therefore, removing the native compatibility of a graphics card on said interpreter between application and hardware can have serious consequences on compatibility and performance. What drives NVIDIA, AMD and Intel to make such a decision?
Farewell to native DirectX 9 support in future graphics
The evolution of graphics APIs in recent times at the graphics chip level has been clear: less dependency on the graphics driver and greater independence from the hardware. It is clear that DirectX 9 was heavily driver dependent and several requirements were no longer built into the main circuit of the graphics card chip, this then had to be emulated via other functions.
It’s a nightmare for driver developers. Since in order for the old games not to suffer from any type of compatibility error, they have to spend hours and elbows to make these games work perfectly. This they achieve in two different ways:
- In some cases, even keeping units and items no longer used by current games inside the GPU just in case.
- Replace the process with another via a compute shader that performs the same task from the driver. Therefore, completely invisible to the application and the user.
Well, it looks like Intel was the first to drop DirectX 9 support in the drivers. Although we also know that AMD and NVIDIA won’t be far behind in this regard for the next generation. All this to localize its human resources to new technologies.
Will the lack of support affect my games?
Well, in the best case, games that use this API will continue to work as usual. In the worst case, we can find screen errors and sudden drops in performance, but these will be in the minority. We cannot forget that when developing games on PC, different techniques are used than on consoles, since we are not talking about a single hardware, but a plurality of configurations.
In reality all this does not mean that games under DirectX 9 stop working, but the optimizations that were made for each new generation of cards will not be done. In any case, we are talking about titles that currently reach several hundred frames without problems on most graphics cards. Plus, your games won’t stop running, they just won’t scale in performance like others.
So if you’re worried that DOTA 2 or CS:GO won’t run on your PC, don’t worry, as Valve has been adapting these games to a more advanced graphics API for some time. or DX11 depending on the case and its dependencies for DirectX 9 have been reduced to a minimum or even removed. In any case, this does not mean that occasionally and in very specific cases we do not see compatibility problems, we cannot get our hands on the fire. Since we have also seen issues in brand new games, under the most advanced APIs and with updated drivers.
