According to a recent Intel Q&A, the company confirmed that driver optimizations for Arc GPUs — relating to poor performance in DirectX 11 and 9 games — is going to be a constant work in progress with no end goal in mind. Basically, Intel’s lack of experience in the discrete GPU driver space will prevent their GPUs from being competitive with older APIs for quite some time.
This was made very apparent by a review from LinusTechTips, where he saw a 50% performance delta between the DX11 and DX12 versions of Shadow of the Tomb Raider running on an Arc A770. In DirectX 11, the A770 only saw around 38FPS, while in DirectX 12 mode, that frame rate bumps up to a whopping 80 FPS.
