@wendell As you have an ARC card in hand now it would be quite interesting how DXVK on Windows might help. Vulkan works well on ARC and DXVK is really fast, so it might be worth a try if it can “fix” some problematic games. It seems to be a pretty “easy” drop-in except for overlays maybe.
Just did some tests (not on Arc though) and just throwing the DXVK DLLs next to the exe of a DX9 or DX11 game seems to work and work really well, surprisingly easy, maybe ARC users would just need some tool that throws those next to games automatically and basically just enhances performance with a single click. Does not work for every game though tested tell my why for example and it outright crashes every time.
Very interesting… It will be awesome to have comparison between Windows+DXVK vs Linux+DXVK as well. Currently playing on Linux with my old GTX 1060 and thinking about upgrading to Intel ARC a750.
While DXVK may be most useful with Intel Arc and older APIs, I’m also getting some good preliminary results using it with my AMD card (Vega 56) and it’s Windows drivers.
Results weren’t as good on my GTX 960 sadly,it seems to be roughly the same frame rate, but with more stuttering often and of course without overlays (and rarely crashes in some games), so overall not really worth it, but it’ll be interesting how it’ll behave on RDNA3.
What I have yet to checkout too is VKD3D (for DX12) it can maybe result in more impressive results, as NVIDIAs DX11 stack on the 960 is probably already getting everything possible out of the card.
Allegedly the parallelism of APIs like Vulkan are supposed to be most helpful for the performance of systems with high thread/core counts, but relatively weak single cores. That describes my system perfectly, so it may well be why I’m seeing more impressive results.
For example, in Assassin’s Creed Origins, a game that was considered extremely demanding at release, the canned benchmark went from 38 fps at 1080p Ultra using the stock AMD and Windows 10 API/driver stack to 50 fps with DXVK. For reference, my system is an old Dell workstation with dual X5687s (Westmere 8c/16t).
I got an Arc A770 LE for Xmas, and while for the games I play it’s been fine (even on system without ReBAR despite their dire warnings), I might need to give this a try. I mostly play weird indie games but would be happy to report my results regardless if people are interested.