Intel has rolled out a new driver update for its Arc series desktop graphics cards. Designed to address performance in DirectX 9 titles, the new driver brings an average of 1.8X improvement across multiple titles.
Of particular note here is CS: GO or Counter Strike: Global Offensive. Despite its age, CS:GO remains an extremely popular title, with nearly a million players playing at any given time. With the latest driver, average frame rates at 1080p are increased by 1.79x over the previous driver.
Most notable is the improvement in frame time consistency. The average frame rate of the 99th percentile or 1% has improved by more than 2x which should translate into a noticeably smoother gaming experience.
Other older but popular titles like League of Legends and Starcraft 2 also show improvements of 1.36x and 1.48x at 1080p.
Being optimized for modern APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan, Arc series graphics cards have always struggled with older APIs, such as DX11, DX10 and DX9. One solution for this was to run these older APIs through DXVK, a Vulkan-based translation layer, which helps improve performance. It seems that Intel is probably using this level of translation to improve performance in older titles.
The new version of the 3953 driver is already available for download from the Intel website.
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