10 ms·

Intel is using DXVK for their Windows Arc GPU DX9 drivers

180 points by pantalaimon 4y ago

rektide 4y ago
badass. way to cut loose an old anchor. i love this trend: build well for the new thing, use open-source compatibility layers to make the old not-good microsoft apis work. that said, intel arc has been slow as dirt for old games. they seem to have, through hard work, turned the corner. im curious how much of that improvement has gotten upstream to the public, to others. versus how much intel has done only for themselves, after putting all their eggs in this open source community project.
- cesaref 4y ago
  I imagine the problem is lack of game specific optimisations in their drivers. In any other field, hacking optimisations in to spot and optimise an algorithm that is used as a benchmark for the hardware would be considered close to fraud, but for the graphics crowd it's all in a days work.
  - xxs 4y ago
    The difference with the benchmarks is that "games" are an actual work and a prime reason to buy the GPU, itself.
  - cyber_kinetist 4y ago
    They don't do this only in benchmarks, they also do it in actual games too! Hearing that NVIDIA engineers actually re-implemented many of the un-optimized shaders released on triple-A games and made their drivers to dynamically swap to their shader implmentation on the fly, is a testament to how NVIDIA really did care about game driver performance.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    It comes down to the fact that in comparing GPUs from a general consumer perspective, unlike traditional benchmarking the goal isn't to look at the technical details of "how much time do these take to execute this exact same algorithm" but "how much time do these take to produce these visually indistinguishable images", since the end user doesn't really care if the algorithm being used is the same, they just want the same output to be produced faster.
    - mastax 4y ago
      I remember in 2008 or thereabouts there was some controversy because one vendor rendered some things at a higher quality than the other. It was a relatively small thing like the edges of alpha textures or texture filtering or something. There was a period of time where some video card reviews would include a visual quality comparison because there could be noticable differences between the two.
      - dotnet00 4y ago
        There were still various 'hard' fixed function components in GPUs which would cause that kind of visual difference back in the day. Technically this does sort of still happen these days (eg the period of time when NVIDIA cards had ray tracing support but AMD cards did not, the quality of the video encoder, or nowadays with the various super-resolution methods used by each vendor), in which case those do tend to get treated separately in third-party benchmarks since not everyone really cares for the quality of those.
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  If DirectX were an open source standard we would have had almost no problem writing translation layers between all the versions and other APIs. Unfortunately, since it's a reverse engineering hack job, there's still too much lost performance left on the table
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    So far, backward compatibility for D3D games on Windows has been excellent though. I really wonder why Intel is the only GPU vendor who has trouble supporting older D3D versions (and if this is such a problem for GPU vendors, why Microsoft doesn't step in and provide a generic D3D9-on-D3D12 driver). (also I think the actual problem isn't a generic D3D9 emulation, but that a good emulation needs to implement thousands of game-specific performance and compatibility hacks which are usually taken care of by the GPU vendor or Microsoft)
    - Scion9066 4y ago
      Microsoft seems to have provided some of that in the OS as open source here: https://github.com/microsoft/D3D9On12 https://github.com/microsoft/D3D9On12 Unfortunately, it looks like it's up to the application developer to support it, unless I'm reading it wrong.
      - fredoralive 4y ago
        Intel were apparently using that for backwards compatibility on Arc[1]. I guess it wasn't good enough and they're using DXVK instead? Or is this new "native" mode DXVK instead? [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/intel-turns-to-code-translation-to-run-old-directx9-games-on-its-newest-gpus/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/intel-turns-to-code-...
        Scion9066 4y ago
        Their readme linked from the article mentions both D3D9On12 and dxvk as some of the licensed software being used: https://downloadmirror.intel.com/761751/readme.txt https://downloadmirror.intel.com/761751/readme.txt They may be using both of those. They mention in the video linked from the article that the driver is choosing between native and the hybrid approach where appropriate, depending on what game/app is running. Maybe they also choose between different hybrid options as well?
sroussey 4y ago
Depending on the game, Intel will switch between their native driver for DX9 and using DXVK to run DX9 stuff via modern Vulcan instead. The driver will decide.
- hulitu 4y ago
  The computer knows better ;).
  - akiselev 4y ago
    Computer says no.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    The computer isn't making the decision, the Intel driver just includes a handmade list of known titles telling it which library to use for each.
- lsbehe 4y ago
  Intel doesn't ship "native" DX9 drivers for Arc. It's either Microsofts D3D9On12 or DXVK.
  - tssva 4y ago
    According to Intel they now do. It will be either their new native DX9 driver or DXVK depending upon the app.
  - burmanm 4y ago
    They do since 3950 and newer builds. That's why 3953 provides almost double the fps in games where they use the native ones (such as CS:Go), not to mention a lot better frametimes. Mostly eSports titles have those native ones.
- Dwedit 4y ago
  There is no native DX9 driver. Just D3D9on12. DXVK is basically "on vulkan" isntead.
slabity 4y ago
Can anyone explain to me the performance difference between having a native OpenGL or DX9/10/11 userspace driver vs having a Vulkan/DX12 userspace driver and using Zink or DXVK to implement the older APIs? From my understanding, Vulkan/DX12 are APIs that are supposedly very low-level and allow fine-grain control over things like memory access, synchronization, and hardware-level optimizations (usually through the use of extensions). For OpenGL and DX9/10/11, these are basically higher-level abstractions that can be implemented on top of the lower-level APIs. Assuming the above is accurate, what advantage do you get by having "native" OpenGL or DX9/10/11 implementations on your GPU? Is there anything Intel is missing out on by using DXVK as opposed to implementing their own implementations? And how does Gallium3D (from the Mesa project) fit in all of this for Linux? Is that a lower-level abstraction than Vulkan?
- msk-lywenn 4y ago
  One of the reasons graphics drivers are huged on windows is because since there was no way to optimize precisely with old APIs like dx9 and gl, drivers would often « recognize » the game engine running and switch to a fast path dedicated to it. That’s why there were updates so often and why you would sometimes even see « improved performance for game X » in the changelog. I guess that’s exactly what is happening here. DXVK is the « generic » driver, while their implementation is fast path for specific games.
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    I wonder if this tradition of game-specific driver patches has even changed with the modern APIs though. If yes we would eventually see less frequent driver updates (which doesn't seem to be the case so far).
    - Sakos 4y ago
      I think we're seeing something related instead. AMD/nVidia have 20+ years of optimizing for specific games in their drivers. Intel doesn't. So they're using DXVK to make up for all the games they don't have the time/resources to optimize for. If this works out for Intel long-term, it would be a huge boon for all of us. It means any future competitors would be able to use DXVK to make up for the disadvantage of joining the game so late.
gfody 4y ago
does this include a miniport driver for regular gdi acceleration? I recently switched from a low end radeon to an arc770 and older software like beyondcompare and vs2015 became noticeably choppy
- tibbydudeza 4y ago
  Does Windows 10 still uses GDI interface (afaik some fancy bitblit stuff from the olden S3 days) - surely that is deprecated by now and everythingis running on top of the GPU ???.
  - ygra 4y ago
    The APIs still exist, as do applications that use them.
  - lzaaz 4y ago
    I use Windows instead of macOS precisely because I can run all of my software since they don't deprecate stuff that old applications use.
  - leeter 4y ago
    Even GDI runs on the GPU[1] it just is slower because bitmaps are stored in system ram vs VRAM. IIRC there are tricks a driver can use to make it faster by default[2]. The (admittedly very dumb) issue I as a developer have switching from MFC/ATL to newer kits is that it makes it very hard to ship all in one apps without bloating them by shipping the control toolkit every single time. I realize this is a dumb complaint, but when I can get something down to ~3.5MB which I consider a win for size squishing in modern apps. But does it make sense for all cases? No, if I was writing something people need to use on more than an occasional basis I'd probably grab a toolkit that did the work for me to use D2D (which btw operates on top of either GDI or DX11, not DX12). [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct2d/comparing-direct2d-and-gdi https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct2d/com... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/gdi-hardware-acceleration https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...
amiga-workbench 4y ago
Its a little amusing that a project meant to help rid users of Windows is being used to prop up Windows for some users.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Not particularly amusing, this has been a risk all along : see what happened to OS/2... P.S.: I am starting to suspect that Steam now doesn't show which games are Linux native, and which run through Wine, am I getting this right ?
  - amiga-workbench 4y ago
    I'm quite sure Steam still displays the SteamOS+Linux badge, I wonder if perhaps you're thinking of the Steam Deck certified badge? That does include games which run through Proton, it just means that the game runs properly.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      I haven't really used Steam in years, that's why I am asking.
  - Dwedit 4y ago
    Some native Linux ports are badly done, and the Windows version runs better.
halotrope 4y ago
Running an ARC 770 Gpu on my linux workstation. After Nvidia messed up wayland support so badly, the switch is easy. Fully open source drivers. Everything is smooth as butter and event Pytorch, Blender etc are (experimentally) supported. Pretty great if you ask me.
- jacooper 4y ago
  > even Pytorch, Blender etc are (experimentally) supported. Certainly better than the joke that is ROCM support for AMD GPUs.
  - halotrope 4y ago
    Yes I mean everything beta and such. But fully open source and what I saw from oneAPI they are doing all the right things recently. Let's hope that Gelsinger is to Intel what Nadella is to Microsoft.
    - bogwog 4y ago
      Let’s not.
  - iod 4y ago
    What specifically is your issue with ROCm & HIP that makes it a joke? It has actually worked great for me on both Blender and Pytorch (Stable-Diffusion) with Debian on my 6700XT. More details in a prior comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32908918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32908918
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      Extremely limited support for one. Why is it locked behind the 6000 series cards? The project has been around since the 500 series cards days and they utterly ignored the entire market for years.
      - iod 4y ago
andrew-ld 4y ago
epic

180 points by pantalaimon 4y ago

badass. way to cut loose an old anchor. i love this trend: build well for the new thing, use open-source compatibility layers to make the old not-good microsoft apis work. that said, intel arc has been slow as dirt for old games. they seem to have, through hard work, turned the corner. im curious how much of that improvement has gotten upstream to the public, to others. versus how much intel has done only for themselves, after putting all their eggs in this open source community project.

cesaref 4y ago
I imagine the problem is lack of game specific optimisations in their drivers. In any other field, hacking optimisations in to spot and optimise an algorithm that is used as a benchmark for the hardware would be considered close to fraud, but for the graphics crowd it's all in a days work.
- xxs 4y ago
  The difference with the benchmarks is that "games" are an actual work and a prime reason to buy the GPU, itself.
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  They don't do this only in benchmarks, they also do it in actual games too! Hearing that NVIDIA engineers actually re-implemented many of the un-optimized shaders released on triple-A games and made their drivers to dynamically swap to their shader implmentation on the fly, is a testament to how NVIDIA really did care about game driver performance.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  It comes down to the fact that in comparing GPUs from a general consumer perspective, unlike traditional benchmarking the goal isn't to look at the technical details of "how much time do these take to execute this exact same algorithm" but "how much time do these take to produce these visually indistinguishable images", since the end user doesn't really care if the algorithm being used is the same, they just want the same output to be produced faster.
  - mastax 4y ago
    I remember in 2008 or thereabouts there was some controversy because one vendor rendered some things at a higher quality than the other. It was a relatively small thing like the edges of alpha textures or texture filtering or something. There was a period of time where some video card reviews would include a visual quality comparison because there could be noticable differences between the two.
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      There were still various 'hard' fixed function components in GPUs which would cause that kind of visual difference back in the day. Technically this does sort of still happen these days (eg the period of time when NVIDIA cards had ray tracing support but AMD cards did not, the quality of the video encoder, or nowadays with the various super-resolution methods used by each vendor), in which case those do tend to get treated separately in third-party benchmarks since not everyone really cares for the quality of those.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
If DirectX were an open source standard we would have had almost no problem writing translation layers between all the versions and other APIs. Unfortunately, since it's a reverse engineering hack job, there's still too much lost performance left on the table
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  So far, backward compatibility for D3D games on Windows has been excellent though. I really wonder why Intel is the only GPU vendor who has trouble supporting older D3D versions (and if this is such a problem for GPU vendors, why Microsoft doesn't step in and provide a generic D3D9-on-D3D12 driver). (also I think the actual problem isn't a generic D3D9 emulation, but that a good emulation needs to implement thousands of game-specific performance and compatibility hacks which are usually taken care of by the GPU vendor or Microsoft)
  - Scion9066 4y ago
    Microsoft seems to have provided some of that in the OS as open source here: https://github.com/microsoft/D3D9On12 https://github.com/microsoft/D3D9On12 Unfortunately, it looks like it's up to the application developer to support it, unless I'm reading it wrong.
    - fredoralive 4y ago
      Intel were apparently using that for backwards compatibility on Arc[1]. I guess it wasn't good enough and they're using DXVK instead? Or is this new "native" mode DXVK instead? [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/intel-turns-to-code-translation-to-run-old-directx9-games-on-its-newest-gpus/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/intel-turns-to-code-...
      - Scion9066 4y ago
        Their readme linked from the article mentions both D3D9On12 and dxvk as some of the licensed software being used: https://downloadmirror.intel.com/761751/readme.txt https://downloadmirror.intel.com/761751/readme.txt They may be using both of those. They mention in the video linked from the article that the driver is choosing between native and the hybrid approach where appropriate, depending on what game/app is running. Maybe they also choose between different hybrid options as well?

sroussey 4y ago

Depending on the game, Intel will switch between their native driver for DX9 and using DXVK to run DX9 stuff via modern Vulcan instead. The driver will decide.

hulitu 4y ago
The computer knows better ;).
- akiselev 4y ago
  Computer says no.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  The computer isn't making the decision, the Intel driver just includes a handmade list of known titles telling it which library to use for each.
lsbehe 4y ago
Intel doesn't ship "native" DX9 drivers for Arc. It's either Microsofts D3D9On12 or DXVK.
- tssva 4y ago
  According to Intel they now do. It will be either their new native DX9 driver or DXVK depending upon the app.
- burmanm 4y ago
  They do since 3950 and newer builds. That's why 3953 provides almost double the fps in games where they use the native ones (such as CS:Go), not to mention a lot better frametimes. Mostly eSports titles have those native ones.
Dwedit 4y ago
There is no native DX9 driver. Just D3D9on12. DXVK is basically "on vulkan" isntead.

slabity 4y ago

Can anyone explain to me the performance difference between having a native OpenGL or DX9/10/11 userspace driver vs having a Vulkan/DX12 userspace driver and using Zink or DXVK to implement the older APIs? From my understanding, Vulkan/DX12 are APIs that are supposedly very low-level and allow fine-grain control over things like memory access, synchronization, and hardware-level optimizations (usually through the use of extensions). For OpenGL and DX9/10/11, these are basically higher-level abstractions that can be implemented on top of the lower-level APIs. Assuming the above is accurate, what advantage do you get by having "native" OpenGL or DX9/10/11 implementations on your GPU? Is there anything Intel is missing out on by using DXVK as opposed to implementing their own implementations? And how does Gallium3D (from the Mesa project) fit in all of this for Linux? Is that a lower-level abstraction than Vulkan?

msk-lywenn 4y ago
One of the reasons graphics drivers are huged on windows is because since there was no way to optimize precisely with old APIs like dx9 and gl, drivers would often « recognize » the game engine running and switch to a fast path dedicated to it. That’s why there were updates so often and why you would sometimes even see « improved performance for game X » in the changelog. I guess that’s exactly what is happening here. DXVK is the « generic » driver, while their implementation is fast path for specific games.
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  I wonder if this tradition of game-specific driver patches has even changed with the modern APIs though. If yes we would eventually see less frequent driver updates (which doesn't seem to be the case so far).
  - Sakos 4y ago
    I think we're seeing something related instead. AMD/nVidia have 20+ years of optimizing for specific games in their drivers. Intel doesn't. So they're using DXVK to make up for all the games they don't have the time/resources to optimize for. If this works out for Intel long-term, it would be a huge boon for all of us. It means any future competitors would be able to use DXVK to make up for the disadvantage of joining the game so late.

gfody 4y ago

does this include a miniport driver for regular gdi acceleration? I recently switched from a low end radeon to an arc770 and older software like beyondcompare and vs2015 became noticeably choppy

tibbydudeza 4y ago
Does Windows 10 still uses GDI interface (afaik some fancy bitblit stuff from the olden S3 days) - surely that is deprecated by now and everythingis running on top of the GPU ???.
- ygra 4y ago
  The APIs still exist, as do applications that use them.
- lzaaz 4y ago
  I use Windows instead of macOS precisely because I can run all of my software since they don't deprecate stuff that old applications use.
- leeter 4y ago
  Even GDI runs on the GPU[1] it just is slower because bitmaps are stored in system ram vs VRAM. IIRC there are tricks a driver can use to make it faster by default[2]. The (admittedly very dumb) issue I as a developer have switching from MFC/ATL to newer kits is that it makes it very hard to ship all in one apps without bloating them by shipping the control toolkit every single time. I realize this is a dumb complaint, but when I can get something down to ~3.5MB which I consider a win for size squishing in modern apps. But does it make sense for all cases? No, if I was writing something people need to use on more than an occasional basis I'd probably grab a toolkit that did the work for me to use D2D (which btw operates on top of either GDI or DX11, not DX12). [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct2d/comparing-direct2d-and-gdi https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct2d/com... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/gdi-hardware-acceleration https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

amiga-workbench 4y ago

Its a little amusing that a project meant to help rid users of Windows is being used to prop up Windows for some users.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
Not particularly amusing, this has been a risk all along : see what happened to OS/2... P.S.: I am starting to suspect that Steam now doesn't show which games are Linux native, and which run through Wine, am I getting this right ?
- amiga-workbench 4y ago
  I'm quite sure Steam still displays the SteamOS+Linux badge, I wonder if perhaps you're thinking of the Steam Deck certified badge? That does include games which run through Proton, it just means that the game runs properly.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    I haven't really used Steam in years, that's why I am asking.
- Dwedit 4y ago
  Some native Linux ports are badly done, and the Windows version runs better.

halotrope 4y ago

Running an ARC 770 Gpu on my linux workstation. After Nvidia messed up wayland support so badly, the switch is easy. Fully open source drivers. Everything is smooth as butter and event Pytorch, Blender etc are (experimentally) supported. Pretty great if you ask me.

jacooper 4y ago
> even Pytorch, Blender etc are (experimentally) supported. Certainly better than the joke that is ROCM support for AMD GPUs.
- halotrope 4y ago
  Yes I mean everything beta and such. But fully open source and what I saw from oneAPI they are doing all the right things recently. Let's hope that Gelsinger is to Intel what Nadella is to Microsoft.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    Let’s not.
- iod 4y ago
  What specifically is your issue with ROCm & HIP that makes it a joke? It has actually worked great for me on both Blender and Pytorch (Stable-Diffusion) with Debian on my 6700XT. More details in a prior comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32908918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32908918
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Extremely limited support for one. Why is it locked behind the 6000 series cards? The project has been around since the 500 series cards days and they utterly ignored the entire market for years.
    - iod 4y ago

andrew-ld 4y ago

epic