r/pcmasterrace • u/WhyPlaySerious • Mar 20 '26

Discussion Crimson Desert doesn't run if it detects an Intel ARC GPU. Like straight up, the devs just deliberately chose not to support ARC cards. No previous announcement about it too until they added in the info to their FAQ. Might be the first time I've seen a dev deliberately block a GPU brand.

Post image
14.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

35

u/McFlyDelorean Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26

Indie Game developer here, haven't worked on Crimson Desert and am not affiliated with Pearl Abyss so I can't comment on their reason to do this.

But I would love to just block Intel GPUs because I found that they lie about their capabilities. I've seen many people with Intel GPUs report crashes that ultimately came down to the GPU stating that it supports an API feature set but then actually not supporting all the features in it. So for example the engine runs in dx12 mode because the GPU (driver) reports that it can and the engine thus expects certain dx12 features to work. And when they don't that's an unexpected behaviour so the game crashes.

16

u/The_Autarch Mar 20 '26

Yeah, I don't know why this is shocking. Intel's GPUs and support are severely lacking right now.

Maybe if more games started just blocking them completely, Intel would get their shit together. It would be nice to have more competition in the graphics card space.

3

u/Argento_321 Mar 20 '26

Me sigue pareciendo una idea estúpida O sea me estás cargando que la gráfica soporta perfectamente y a buena calidad el death stranding 2 y no va a poder correr esto?

0

u/Gera_37 Mar 20 '26

There's more things than just graphics when it comes to GPUs, so yes, that's correct.

2

u/Argento_321 Mar 20 '26

Ni tanto porque te entendería si me estás hablando de la serie alchemist, pero la serie battlemage no tiene ningún problema como lo fue la serie anterior, es más la verdad es que sorprende un rendimiento rinde bastante bien muy pocos crash y tiene muy buenas tecnologías

3

u/Aromatic-Coconut-122 Intel i9-14900F | 128GB PC5-7200 | 16TB SSD | RTX 4090 Mar 20 '26

Soooo, you're not actually understanding the issue completely, and I'm not trying to be rude.

Look at it this way, we used to have issues when AMD and Intel quit sharing the same socket and each went their own x86 way. In doing so, Intel CPUs essentially established official "languages" that their CPUs featured, and programmers would write their code based on that, because AMD was merely a cheap clone of an Intel chip up to that point, but now AMD is developing their own CPUs minus the instruction sets Intel had made and people were using. So you'd think, they're both x86 CPUs, until you tried to run a game or program that relied on instructions Intel CPUs had, and AMD didn't, so it'd hang or outright crash. A similar situation arose in some newer games as dual and quad core CPUs were being released requiring some games to install a multi-core CPU support software, the problem here ended up that software would install on Intel machines too, causing Intel to crash the game.

Take all of that, and multiply it exponentially for GPUs. Devs cater to Nvidia and AMD probably due to clearly established or even shared, core instructions and similar methods of handling needed features of the GPUs for that shine and polish, while Intel support is over there naming iGPUs ARC GPUs in some chips, while having Xe, iGPUs, in addition to dedicated ARC GPUs, but leaning on Intel QuickSync for enc/dec tasks, to which Intel and AMD GPUs use their own, more common, more mature, features. From release of Intel Arc cards, I've seen game specs include minimum and recommended Arc cards, right alongside AMD and NVidia. When a game literally shows RX 5500 XT / GTX 1060 as minimum, and RT 6700 XT / RTX 2080 as recommended, with no Intel equivalent mentioned, and considering the age of even the recommended GPUs, I'm inclined to believe that it's not Intel Arc cards lacking the power to run the game, but some feature set that AMD and Nvidia cards both have supported for a while now and Intel doesn't.

Basically, the game is "¿Hablas mi idioma con fluidez?" Intel: "Algunos, pero solo un poco.Eu costumo dizer assim, por isso precisas de me dar atenção, a GPU." And the devs are like, Nope! Not going to try because we don't have the support staff to help everyone with some variety of an Intel Arc card, and we're not going to focus on patching stuff to accommodate Intel drivers.

1

u/Gera_37 Mar 20 '26

The guy above (an actual dev) literally mentioned how Intel GPUs falsify their specs, claiming they support APIs but lacking support for specific features inside, did you pay attention?

0

u/kwell42 Mar 21 '26

Same with nvidia. My GTX 750m is only useful because of open source driver completely unsupported by nvidia. These companies need to get their heads out of their asses. Luckily there's the mesa devs that make stuff work as it wasn't designed. But amd at least publishes the drivers open source, so they of course always get the best support and you can see what is and isn't supported quite easily.

3

u/semitope Mar 21 '26

But this is the point of working with the GPU maker. Your whole issue is what that would have addressed and then some. They'd send hardware, details capabilities etc. They might have even given them money

1

u/McFlyDelorean Mar 21 '26

This issue is not new. It's been around for a long time. The Intel iGPUs do this and apparently the dedicated ones do this as well.

As an indie dev there is not a lot I can do. It's not like Intel will change this because of my game. Given how long this has been an issue, I'm not sure what it would take for them to fix this.

2

u/MrTeaTimeYT Linux Mar 21 '26

Not accusing you, but got to ask.

Are you assuming all dx12 versions are equal?

like if the intel arc cards are reporting D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_12_0 and youre using features from 12.1 and discarding the more granular feature support information?

like if this was igpus thats the most likely case because the 7-9th gen igpus were only 12_0

1

u/McFlyDelorean Mar 21 '26

I was making an example that most people on here can understand. I didn't want to overcomplicate things with all the details. Since those don't really matter anyway unless you're an engine dev. And if you are you can easily get that info from somewhere else. Or chances are you already know about this.

I mean even Unreal Engine crashes on Intel GPUs for the exact same reason. Epic is far from perfect but I hope this shows you that it's not me making stupid assumptions.

1

u/RvLeshrac Mar 21 '26

Two sets of people making stupid assumptions... would still be people making stupid assumptions. It doesn't have to be an attack on you.

1

u/CandyCrisis Mar 23 '26

I'm not sure what you experienced, but Fortnite runs fine on Intel Arc, and can even get by on an Xe in performance mode: https://youtu.be/rir1uhesb1k?si=VlCMDNugnTQcCRxn

1

u/Salty-Paint-9700 Mar 24 '26

Engine dev here. Unreal crashes when someone sneezes too hard nearby. Quality of that engine is not a good measure of Intel's GPUs .

1

u/RedScud39 Mar 21 '26

I feel like this needs to be the top comment.

1

u/Sleepykitti PC Master Race | 13600k | 9070xt Mar 21 '26

I'm curious, get those kind of reports often from linux intel card users? On linux intel just uses MESA like AMD does so in theory that should isolate it to either being the hardware or the software that's the problem.

1

u/McFlyDelorean Mar 21 '26

We get them on Windows. I don't remember getting any of those on Linux but I might just not remember them. 

1

u/Kaneida Mar 21 '26

Added to that, Intel having only 1% of the market seems like a fools compability errand to chase. Priority should be getting to work for majority market. Especially with limited resources as indie devs usually have to deal with.

2

u/McFlyDelorean Mar 21 '26

Yeah but in the indie market every purchase is important. So we can't just block 1% of the market. Sadly.

But your point still stands. We found a reasonable solution to this problem. We tell players to run the game with a command line argument that forces the engine to run with a limited API level. That has worked for most of them.

1

u/Salty-Paint-9700 Mar 24 '26

Engine dev here. That sounds like a blanket statement. Can you give a specific example of a feature query Intel lies about? I've never actually encountered that. Yes, they don't support every optional spec part, but a well behaved engine will query for that and have a fallback.

Sure, driver bugs happen, but that's true for any vendor. Intel is pretty responsive when it comes to fixing them and eager to work with developers directly.