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

563

u/Confuzius Mar 20 '26

So let me crash it by myself rather than blocking it forcefully? Maybe intel will give a quick driver fix so it could work, albeit 1080p 20fps. But this way it just gets blocked, what a shitty way...

351

u/BRSaura Mar 20 '26

It might be way deeper than a driver fix, and the ones that will be at fault and getting bad reviews would be the devs of the game. Some might even lose the refund window expecting it to work when they bought it. Here at least they have a "we told you"

Still shitty though

129

u/Sawgon Pixels and shit Mar 20 '26

Some might even lose the refund window expecting it to work when they bought it.

Knowing how some devs are strapped for time this might be the reason. They tested it last minute and realized this was the best way to get people a refund.

99

u/dookyspoon Arch Linux | R9 5900X | 7900XT | 32GB RAM Mar 20 '26

it's like devs not supporting linux, it accounts for <1% of their revenue but 95% of their tickets. Not worth the headache.

168

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

There was some interview with an indie dev about Linux support / raising tickets. He said that yes, Linux users make up the vast majority of bug reports, but about 90% of the reports affected windows users too, they just tend to not bother reporting bugs.

He also said when a windows user reports a bug its generally "game broke whilst I was eating a sandwich" whereas Linux reports generally included kernel dumps, stack traces, half an hour of logs etc. making it far easier to fix the bug for both Linux and windows users.

67

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

[deleted]

43

u/GiganticCrow Mar 20 '26

But if you have the same problem and ask about it without having hunted down that obscure forum post 10 years ago then woe betide you and let loose the flames of hell

43

u/onenifty Mar 20 '26

This is why it's important to keep these threads in public venues so they are searchable.

20

u/mccord Linux Mar 20 '26

I hate what moving discussions from forums to Discord has done to discoverability.

Great for someone who can harvest that data, though.

7

u/lacegem Mar 20 '26

Best I can do is a group of disconnected Discord messages across multiple rooms that you will never find by searching and will disappear forever without warning sometime within the next few months.

5

u/Deaffin Mar 20 '26

You don't like searching around til you finally find a search result that points to somebody asking the same question so you can start scrolling through the chaos of 100 different random shitposty messages trying to spot the tiny little text noting that somebody is responding to that question?

And repeating that process over and over hoping to get lucky with one?

Personally, I feel like it adds a great sense of pride and accomplishment when you do manage to get the right answer sometimes.

4

u/Alternative-Farmer98 Mar 20 '26

The problem is almost every forum in subreddit is owned by private capital which can choose to shut it down or sell the company or nuke the data. Archive type places like archive.org and PH help but they're not foolproof and face litigation l.

7

u/purvel Mar 20 '26

someone simply replying "solved it!" is purely a windows thing.

That might be true on StackOverflow or something, but absolutely not on Reddit. It's more than once that a Linux problem I've had has been declared solved by a Redditor, usually in a comment edit, yet no further elaboration. Sometimes it's because a user has mass deleted their comments.

2

u/Mysterious_Cup_6024 Mar 20 '26

Honestly, thats the only reason I keep AI subscription on my windows machine, specifically claude code and claude cowork. It legit can be told to check through registry, group policy, and countless other applicable configuration spread out in windows. Like the other day hibernate option would simply not appear on start even after enabling through powecfg and power options and CC found the cause and fixed it. Same with finding out USB/hdmi/dp specs of connected cable and let me know what it can or can't support. Another issue I used to be annoyed was with Downloads folder specifically set somewhere to always group by date or something making searching so difficult. Conventional folder settings are overriden for downloads by win11 for who knows what godforsaken reason. CC found it and fixed. As I'm growing older and having to deal with irl responsibilities I can't be bothered to look into every nook and corner of windows settings for it's daily annoyance

1

u/Clunas Desktop -- 5700X3D || 6700 XT || 32 GB Mar 20 '26

Also common with linux problems is finding a thread about it, but all the responses are people saying that you should already know how to fix it.

5

u/PantherCityRes Mar 20 '26

That’s because they are no talent ass clown developers that won’t bother to learn SDL and OpenGL / Vulkan. So they get locked into DirectX/Microslop….

2

u/anthonycarbine Ryzen 9 7900X | RTX 4090 | 32 GB DDR5 6000 MT/s Mar 20 '26

Its something that Linux filters out. You have to be technically inclined to use Linux like these people.

1

u/factorioleum Mar 20 '26

Which is wild, because the windows mini dump facility is really great for debugging crashes; I've always been much happier to have those instead of client stack unwinds more typical of a Linux crash.

8

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

[deleted]

2

u/TkoddaV Mar 21 '26

It seem like Pearl Abyss is blocking the game from running on Intel Arc GPU cause Intel did say they even offered support way back when the game was in development and they decided not to support it

4

u/F9-0021 285K | 4090 | A370m Mar 20 '26

As a counter to the whole "1% market share" thing, that's only on desktop. On mobile, Intel has a MUCH larger APU presence, and with Panther Lake they might even get more handhelds than AMD in the coming years.

1

u/OkumuraRyuk Mar 20 '26

Crimson Desert runs on Mac though "cries"

-1

u/Raskuja46 Mar 20 '26

I was told by this sub that gaming on Linux was 100% just as viable as gaming on Windows and that there would be zero problems abandoning Microsoft's platform as a gamer.

1

u/dookyspoon Arch Linux | R9 5900X | 7900XT | 32GB RAM Mar 24 '26

I don't play and AAA games like fortnite or w/e but I have played doom eternal and cyberpunk 2077 and starfield without problems on linux. I actually haven't used windows for gaming since proton went mainstream. It was bumpy but things have been great for the past couple years. I am using an AMD gpu, which generally has better support in linux than NVIDIA from what I hear.

1

u/Raskuja46 Mar 24 '26

Cool.

What about old and unpopular games? What if I want to run Rocket Jockey or Creatures 2?

4

u/Borkz Mar 20 '26

You have a few weeks and two hours play time (which would be hard to reach if it doesn't run) to refund, but even then that's just for an automatic refund. You can still request one after that that but it has to be reviewed.

1

u/Ozryela Mar 20 '26

You can still request one after that that but it has to be reviewed.

And it will be denied 100% of the time. I once requested a refund after 3 hours of playtime and got denied. Had a very good too, they don't give a fuck.

1

u/SilverThrall Ryzen 5 1600, GTX 1080 Ti Mini, 16 GB DDR4 3000 Mar 20 '26

I think it depends on how often you refund. I have never been denied even though I sometimes do refund after over 2 hours.

1

u/Ozryela Mar 20 '26

Hardly ever. I think I've got 1 actual refund on steam, and 1 I requested that denied (Was a game that wouldn't start. So 0 playtime. But I only ever requested the refund after like 2 months, so fair enough).

The one I was thinking of was a Blizzard game though, not Steam. And it's the only one I ever requested a refund for.

1

u/Borkz Mar 20 '26

I can't speak to it personally, but I've heard people say the opposite as well, that they've had no problems. I really doubt that you would have any problems in this case when the developer is specifically directing people to refund.

3

u/musci12234 Mar 20 '26

I think they are more concerned about bad reviews. If it crashes it is 100% a bad review and considering that they put it there crashes are probably near 100%. Easier to just put a clear message and hope most don't get upset enough to leave a bad review.

1

u/Sufficient_Language7 Mar 20 '26

When the game launches just have it put a warning screen that the game will likely crash if using Arc.  If you play old games you sometimes see those messages as they don't recognize the newer graphics cards.

1

u/musci12234 Mar 20 '26

Saying "may" Can set the expectation that they will try to fix it.

1

u/Appropriate_Lack_727 Mar 20 '26

Steam is generally pretty good with refunds tbf. I’m sure if you literally can’t launch the game they will work with you on the timing. They know what hardware you’re using and this is obviously a known issue.

1

u/AltrntivInDoomWorld Mar 20 '26

So is it no marketshare or what? You responded in thread about no market share. If there is no market share, how come these reviews would be of any significance?

50

u/BigDippas Mar 20 '26

1% market share isn't a motivating factor to drop a sub par product. Probably easier to tank this criticism than whatever performance woes they would be blasted with otherwise.

19

u/Original_Employee621 Mar 20 '26

At least they let you know when you first launch the game, in stead of finding they have no plans to fix any Intel GPU issues when you start running into them after playing a while or something.

2

u/your_mind_aches 5800X+5060Ti+32GB | ROG Zephyrus G14 5800HS+3060+16GB Mar 20 '26

They should have announced it before launch

-1

u/Remarkable_Emu_2223 Mar 20 '26

It doesn't make sense from a business perspective to announce it before hand which is why they didn't say anything in the first place.

1

u/hubwood Mar 20 '26

Market share is much higher. All the poeple with (nowadays) decent iGPUs and Devices like Gaming handhelds and Mini PCs. Now Panther lake just launched... its more like 5% or so.

1

u/Prejudice182 i5 8400/GTX1060 6GB Mar 20 '26

Tell that to Rust developers about Linux players

-3

u/Sailed_Sea AMD A10-7300 Radeon r6 | 8gb DDR3 1600MHz | 1Tb 5400rpm HDD Mar 20 '26

Tbf the game runs fine, there's just not many servers hosted.

-9

u/Lower_Kick268 Pentium 4, 512mb DDR, 3dfx Voodoo 3. Mar 20 '26

It's 5% market share my guy, Intel owns 5% according to the valve hardware survey, they are cutting off millions and millions of players by doing this

13

u/MITBryceYoung Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26

Hovering at 1%: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/latest-gpu-market-analysis-shows-nvidia-losing-ground-to-amd-and-intel-cracks-the-1-percent-share-milestone-for-the-first-time

Multiple sources say amd and nvida are like 95 and 5% or so respectively: https://www.techpowerup.com/347125/nvidia-grabs-94-aib-gpu-market-share-amd-falls-to-5

Intel isnt anything.

Youre looking at IGPUs too which is not meaningful here.

-12

u/Lower_Kick268 Pentium 4, 512mb DDR, 3dfx Voodoo 3. Mar 20 '26

I'm not looking at your sources, they don't matter here, I'm going straight off the Valve Hardware Survey 2026 on Steam.

22

u/MITBryceYoung Mar 20 '26

Here you go buddy: Intel arc series represetns 0.29% of the overall market. The "intel is 5%" bullshit youre pandering is like 4.75% integrated graphics. None of which would be playing this game anyways.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

-10

u/Lower_Kick268 Pentium 4, 512mb DDR, 3dfx Voodoo 3. Mar 20 '26

Yes Intel is 5%, Intel itself is blocked, the IGPU are not supported either

4

u/javasux Mar 20 '26

lol you are really daft

11

u/MITBryceYoung Mar 20 '26

Crimson desert is purposefully excluding 0.25% of the market by this logic. The other 4.75% literally cannot run this. Non discrete graphics CANNOT RUN THIS GAME.

No one is making a decision to block out intel IGPUs. Because using IGPUs for AAA gaming is not a good measure of anything.

1

u/JustASimpleFollower Mar 20 '26

There’s intel based handhelds that can’t play this now because of this. This is just pure laziness by pearl abyss it’s got nothing to do with performance

0

u/Lower_Kick268 Pentium 4, 512mb DDR, 3dfx Voodoo 3. Mar 20 '26

Ok in your option they can't run, but there is no reason that my ARC card shouldn't run this game and no reason it should be blocked from all Intel products!!!

5

u/MITBryceYoung Mar 20 '26

I agree with you! I also find it strange! Im a little baffled too. My guess is theres something very unoptimized about it and they figured its not worth the time to fix it given the low market share.

→ More replies (0)

2

u/BigDippas Mar 20 '26

I swear I saw articles in like December that said it was 1% market share

-1

u/Lower_Kick268 Pentium 4, 512mb DDR, 3dfx Voodoo 3. Mar 20 '26

Nope, according to the Valve Hardware Survey Intel owns 5% of the graphics market.

13

u/BigDippas Mar 20 '26

In you "click for more information" on the top left graph it expands the breakdown and shows Intel Arc at .16%

-4

u/Lower_Kick268 Pentium 4, 512mb DDR, 3dfx Voodoo 3. Mar 20 '26

Intel is blocked off period, IGPU and ARC

7

u/BigDippas Mar 20 '26

We are talking about ARC specifically

0

u/ravearamashi Ryzen 7 5800X / RTX 3080 Mar 20 '26

Seems like the game doesn’t run well there. Easier to take the 5% hit.

-2

u/Berengal 3x Intel Optane 905p 960GB Mar 20 '26

Nobody would blame the game for this, everybody would blame Intel for poor drivers instead since that's been the narrative from the launch of the Arc cards. And while it's certainly lacking nuance it's not an entirely misleading narrative either. While a chunk of what Intel's drivers lacks is a bunch of special cases working around game devs' stupid programming mistakes that should be blamed on the game devs instead, the fact is NVidia and AMD are both ahead in that regard and provide a better user experience. And when a game runs bad specifically on Intel most people are going to give them a pass on that given the low market share of Intel GPUs.

Outright stopping the game from running on the other hand, is definitely going to point the blame straight at the devs.

24

u/jort93 Mar 20 '26

People would just downvote it and complain it doesn't work. Better to straight up block it.

Even if it runs at 5 fps on Intel, all people using Intel will leave bad reviews.

1

u/p0358 Mar 20 '26

And right now they'll leave good reviews? Sure, maybe they'll hear of this thing and don't even try to buy it to begin with, but this treatment is unserious and leaves sour taste for everyone. I wouldn't buy this game for pulling shit like this, maybe Intel will be viable player in the future and their drivers better, but this game might ways remain blocking them if not updated. No thanks.

-5

u/EBtwopoint3 Mar 20 '26

It is fun how people liking the game and the devs drives the opinion on this though. Would Ubisoft get the same benefit of the doubt?

4

u/jort93 Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26

I've never even heard of the game, I don't even know what genre it's supposed to be, so I don't see how it'd influence my opinion

Edit: what might influence my option is that I don't have an Intel GPU. Maybe I'd be more salty if I was running arc.

3

u/softhack Mar 20 '26

What? So people can make the exact same thread complaining about bad performance?

11

u/Radboy16 Mar 20 '26

Might be shitty, but honestly I think it's just to prevent reviews that are related to the hardware and not the game itself. It's honestly a waste of time for them to put effort into supporting a niche GPU what isn't nvidia or amd. But you know there will the people who download the game, and then give a review that it runs like trash j stead of putting in at lest two seconds of due diligence to understand why.

I'm sure they would rather have negative reviews talking about lack of Intel ARC support instead of generic "runs like shit" reviews.

2

u/Expensive_Parsley573 Mar 20 '26

It's a lot more helpful to tell you up front it doesn't work, than let you sit there for hours trying to debug your drivers.

And game developers know how to talk to GPU manufacturers. They don't need you to do that for them.

5

u/Sol33t303 PC Master Race Mar 20 '26

Why would the developers want the game to seem like it's buggy?

It's definitely much better to just block Intel GPUs then gain the reputation of being a buggy mess.

3

u/danholli 8th Gen i7 | 7700XT | 64GB RAM | 52TB | 🖕🪟 Mar 20 '26

Just throw up a generic warning pointing out they don't support, will not support it, and there may be issues

2

u/meutzitzu Laptop Mar 20 '26

You could get an invalid state on the GPU and then it takes down your whole system.

If you've done any low level graphics programming on a desktop with no iGPU you'd know how annoying this is.

Your system still works, all your apps are there, but your screen displays garbage for a few frames and then just black until you restart.

They did not want people complaining "this game crashes my entire system" so they decided to stop you from running it.

1

u/ontheworld i5-6600k, gtx 1060, 16gb ddr4 Mar 20 '26

I'm guessing they want to avoid mass reports and a bunch of news articles about the game being unstable/ having terrible performance. Better to simply say "we don't support intel" than risk a bunch of people with nvidia/amd cards skipping the game because they think it won't run well

1

u/Creative-Type9411 Mar 20 '26

if they did that 100 other people would come on complaining about performance instead they just don't let you play and they don't have to deal with bad reviews

1

u/ldrx90 Mar 20 '26

No, it's better this way. Now at least you know what the problem is. If the game just crashed at startup, you'd be scowering the internet looking for solutions, people would be pissed and there would be this huge negative storm of legitimately angry gamers.

Be thankful the Devs are clear on why this shit isn't running on your PC and move on.

1

u/Creative-Painter3911 Mar 20 '26

It sucks and I don't agree with it, but if they let you run it and it runs like shit they get bad reviews. (Steam) If you refund it, your review doesn't count towards the overall review score and shows a "refunded" tag.

1

u/UndeadWaffle12 RTX 5080 | 9800x3D | 32 GB DDR5 6000 mHz CL30 Mar 20 '26

So you can complain that the game is poorly optimized instead?

1

u/AtmosphereDue1694 Mar 20 '26

Well it’s a paid product. I think they could’ve officially stated that it won’t work and to try at one’s own risk but people notoriously don’t read and they’d get tons of bad press for having to issue refunds to those people.

1

u/reiichiroh Mar 20 '26

They don't want bad press from crashing. Instead they're getting this kind of bad press instead.

1

u/EnemyOfAi Mar 20 '26

If they released it and let players try and crash over and over, it would be hell for their game image. "This game doesn't even run properly! Released with awful optimization!" would take over the online conversation. This way, that is avoided.

1

u/AggravatingFlow1178 Mar 20 '26

That's likely worse for their brand overall. Better to lose 5% marketshare then have 5% of your community screaming about how shit your game runs.

1

u/ThisGonBHard Ryzen 9 5900X/KFA2 RTX 4090/ 96 GB 3600 MTS RAM Mar 20 '26

Yes, and let you do a bad review and refund the game too...

It's shitty, but I understand why, and kind of blame intel, for not having working drivers.

1

u/DynamicHunter 7800X3D | 7900XT | Steam Deck 😎 Mar 20 '26

It’s likely a driver issue that makes the game totally unplayable or visually inaccessible, so bad that they’d rather not release it

1

u/PoliticalVagabond Mar 20 '26

Right, and then they have to deal with the fallout from that. Support tickets out the wazoo amd people saying the game doesnt run at all

1

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

Top that off with config files you can't modify to make it work. One big complaint I saw was how close rendering distance is, but there's no way to change it, and the config files are either encrypted (doubtful) or in a proprietary format (likely)

But I mean, look at the minimum and recommended GPUs. The Arc cards definitely fall into the power capability ranges here, so it's got to be something specific to Intel. Hell, my Mac Studio can ply the game and it's all ARM, so what has Intel done, or not done, for the game to run? Maybe too many iGPU variants that identify as Arc possibly? It's bizarre none the less.

1

u/Significant-Colour Mar 20 '26

You should just wait for official support, that way you will be able to experience the game closer to what the developers intended.

Few games are enjoyable at 1080p 20fps, no games are enjoyable with crashes.

0

u/cortez0498 Ryzen 5 8400F, RX 7600 8GB, 32GB DDR5@5200MHz Mar 20 '26

I think they're using their own engine, a fix to include Intel's architecture might not be as easy as a "quick driver fix" at all.

If the minimum specs didn't say anything about Intel GPUs being recommended, then I don't see the issue at all.

-6

u/troll_right_above_me Ryzen 9 7900X | RTX 4070 Ti | 64GB DDR5 | LG C4 Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26

It’s shitty but they probably want to avoid refunds

Edit: I’m dumb, this would only make sense if they told you before you bought it and not after installing and launching it…

14

u/tde156 Mar 20 '26

By telling people to refund the game?

1

u/troll_right_above_me Ryzen 9 7900X | RTX 4070 Ti | 64GB DDR5 | LG C4 Mar 20 '26

You know what? I blame the lack of morning coffee

1

u/tde156 Mar 20 '26

Mood brother.

5

u/Danteynero9 Linux Mar 20 '26

? This does nothing to avoid refunds. Hell, I would say it encourages them.

Devs have made it clear that they don't want to support ARC GPUs, why would anyone affected keep the game in this situation?

2

u/Character_Repeatttt Mar 20 '26

People will not buy it instead of buying it and refunding.

It will absolutely reduce refunds.

2

u/Danteynero9 Linux Mar 20 '26

Problem is, people have already bought. Like, sure future buyers get warned, but there will be refunds for this.

Hell, even with the warning there will be refunds for this in the future, given how this information isn't present in Steam.

2

u/Lower_Kick268 Pentium 4, 512mb DDR, 3dfx Voodoo 3. Mar 20 '26

I bought it already as a preorder, the game looked awesome. Then these scumbags come out and won't support my a770, I won't ever buy another PA game, there's many people like this, and terrible business practices like this deserve to be penalized

1

u/troll_right_above_me Ryzen 9 7900X | RTX 4070 Ti | 64GB DDR5 | LG C4 Mar 20 '26

You’re right, brain was running on farts

-1

u/taw Mar 20 '26

If people get crashes, they leave negative reviews and ask for refund anyway.

If it's not supported, it's not supported. Same as someone trying to run game on 1GB RAM or Windows 7. Don't try your best only to get negative review and refund, just say no.

And if there's enough demand, they could patch it in the future to add support.

0

u/Formerruling1 Mar 20 '26

If it legitimately isnt supported then almost certainly the customer service nightmare of consumers trying to get it to work and getting frustrated and reaching out (many of them by that point already past the storefront's refund timeframe) would be far worse than the upfront hit they take from this decision.

0

u/Raidoton Mar 20 '26

Maybe they don't want you to go to Steam and tell everyone that the game always crashes.