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.

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

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)

Unfortunately, it looks like it's up to the application developer to support it, unless I'm reading it wrong.