If you haven't been paying attention to gaming news, folks have been hyping new single-player action RPG Crimson Desert pretty hard lately. To be fair, it's a great game, with deep action combat, a sprawling open world to explore, and killer current-generation graphics. If you're keen to play the game but you have an Intel Arc GPU, however, bad news—you're out of luck.
Turns out, users with Intel graphics simply can't play Crimson Desert at all. It's not a situation where the performance is bad, or there are major bugs, or anything like that. The game simply won't even start, throwing up an error saying that "The graphics device is currently not supported."
It's not completely clear if this is an error message arising from a technical problem or if it's a hard-coded check and lockout. We wouldn't normally even consider the latter circumstance, but it's a possibility in this case, as Pearl Abyss has an entry in its FAQ for the game that explicitly says the title doesn't currently support Intel Arc graphics products.
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Recommending that users return the game if they have specific hardware is surprising, especially considering that Intel actually ships the largest number of graphics processors for PCs. While it's true that Intel Arc discrete cards barely manage a percentage point of market share, there are a whole lot of systems out there with Intel CPUs and no discrete GPUs. All Intel CPUs from Meteor Lake onwards use some variation of an Arc graphics architecture, and Intel actually has the fastest integrated GPU right now with its Core Ultra 300H series processors, but users hoping to play Crimson Desert on integrated Intel graphics are also left out in the cold.
So what to do? Well, since it's pretty unlikely you have an Arc GPU, you're probably in the clear. I say "probably" because some users with high-end GeForce RTX cards have actually been getting the same error pop-up, as shown in the example below:
Some folks have theorized that the issue may be a lack of DirectX 12 Work Graphs support on Intel Arc GPUs. However, AMD doesn't support Work Graphs on its RDNA 2-based graphics hardware (Radeon RX 6000 series), and yet those cards can run the game just fine, so it's clearly not that.
Comment from r/pcmasterrace
Whatever the issue is, we suspect Intel can resolve it in a driver update. Intel has previously updated its Arc drivers to fix poor performance and graphical errors in Pearl Abyss' earlier game, Black Desert Online, which was based on an older version of the BlackSpace engine that underpins Crimson Desert. PA's admission the game doesn't support Arc GPUs "currently" implies it may do so in the future. However, the fact that it is encouraging users to seek refunds suggests that it may take some time to add support, if it arrives at all.
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