Some games don't load the apitrace DLLs from their working directory, so you can use apitrace to hook the graphics API you are interested in instead with the following command:
apitrace.exe trace -a <API> <game.exe>
Some programs prevent apitrace DLLs to be loaded from next to their executable or directly load system DLLs. This means we have to put apitrace into the system folder, but this prevents apitrace from loading a proper DirectX implementation since it will try to load itself. Luckily apitrace has a feature to set a custom folder from which the DirectX DLLs will be loaded.