Owners of Intel’s ARC graphics cards were unpleasantly surprised to learn that they were prevented from playing the new Crimson Desert game.
It happens that you cannot run some games on certain graphics cards. For example, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle or Doom: The Dark Ages do not work on older graphics cards that do not support raytracing. However, it has not yet happened that a game blocks current graphics cards without any explanation.
Until today, when it was revealed that the action game Crimson Desert simply does not support Intel ARC graphics cards.
When we say that Crimson Desert does not support Intel graphics, we do not mean their weakest models – but all models of Intel graphics cards. Also, when we say that those graphics are not supported, we don’t mean that they have poor performance – but the game cannot be run at all on that hardware.
This is already controversial in itself, and the additional problem is that the Pearl Abyss development team did not warn or inform customers with Intel ARC graphics cards prior to the game’s release that the game won’t work for them. They only added that notification later – after the game was released.
Although the share of users of Intel ARC cards is relatively small (only 5% of users on Steam), this is still surprising and astonishing. Especially since Pearl Abyss did not explain why the game is not supported for Intel ARC, ie. is there any technical obstacle for that.