Developer Pearl Abyss says 'please refer to the refund policy'

Gamers on Intel graphics left in the lurch as the developer apparently has no plans to fix its game on the biggest GPU vendor.

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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.

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.

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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Zak is a freelance contributor to Tom's Hardware with decades of PC benchmarking experience who has also written for HotHardware and The Tech Report.

A modern-day Renaissance man, he may not be an expert on anything, but he knows just a little about nearly everything.

80251 said: If a game is written to the DX11 or DX12 API doesn't that imply it should work with all GPUs that support those APIs?

"We’re aware that Crimson Desert currently doesn’t launch on systems with Intel GPUs and we’re hugely disappointed that players using Intel graphics hardware can’t jump into the world of Pywel at launch.

Getting games running smoothly is always a partnership between developers and hardware makers.

Over the past several years, we’ve reached out to Pearl Abyss many times to help test, validate, and optimize support for Intel graphics, providing early hardware, drivers, and engineering resources across multiple generations, including Alchemist, Battlemage, Meteor Lake, and Lunar Lake.

Our teams are deeply committed to helping all studios deliver the best experience possible, providing open tools, documentation, and direct engineering support to make sure their games run well for everyone, including the tens of millions of players using Intel GPUs.

We remain ready to assist Pearl Abyss however we can.

For details on the choice not to enable Intel support at launch, please reach out directly to Pearl Abyss." Intel Rep to Wccftech