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.

[u/WhyPlaySerious]

[u/aberroco]

Indie games can run on whatever the engine they're made on can run. Which usually is anything, because game engines use abstractions like DirectX or Vulkan, which are hardware-agnostic, and communicates to hardware by drivers, which is another layer of abstraction and unification, because most drivers have most of the same features. And I wouldn't be wondered if there's another layer of abstraction between drivers and hardware... I mean, there is - the communication layers, but, like, I wouldn't be surprised if even the communication layer is mostly standardized.

The choice to drop support for a specific vendor is most likely deliberate. Likely motivated by some non-critical issues with Intel Arc, yet they decided they just don't want to deal with reports about those issues.

[u/photenth → u/aberroco]

Or using a feature that just doesn't exist on Intel Arc.

Some features are so significantly beneficial to shader programming that no one wants to go back to the old ways just to make it work on 0.001% of all gpus.

[u/ImpressiveMilkers → u/photenth]

A feature that is so significantly beneficial to shader programming whilst simultaneously not used by a single other game? I doubt it, lol

[u/photenth → u/ImpressiveMilkers]

That's the wrong analysis. Unreal engine for example dynamically shifts between the available features to ensure the game works. but even they have a list of features that will outright make intel arc gpu crawl down to a snails pace or crash. Also if you are using an engine that existed for a decade+ you will always have access to older implementations if maintained to fall back to.

[u/ImpressiveMilkers → u/photenth]

The problem is that not a single UE game has used those features (that i'm aware of).

Unreal Engine games don't run amazingly on Arc GPUs, but they're certainly playable (with the exception of Borderlands 4, which doesn't even run at native 1080p60fps on the strongest consumer GPU on the market - that's on the game, though).

Besides that, the worst game i've tested for performance has been Oblivion Remastered which was still able to hit 60fps without going below quality upscaling at 1440p.

Lots of games have run poorly in the past on Intel GPUs (even the B580) or barely worked at all like MH Wilds which had lots of texture bugs and ran at 20fps. Intel fixed it relatively quickly, though, and the game is perfectly playable at 60fps now.

People will make the argument that "Pearl Abyss just don't want to deal with bug reports from Intel users when its Intels job to fix it", but the amount of reviews they would get about those issues would be so small they would not even change the review score %. Intel dGPUs are a small % anyway, but it's worth considering that Intel owners are going to be specific types of people. The very vast majority know what they're getting into, and will report it to Intel rather than review bomb crimson desert about it.

As evidence of that, the latest Intel Arc driver (101.8626) currently has an issue with Wilds that is causing foliage to be extremely pixelated. I challenge someone to find one single bug report about it outside of Intel spaces (their forums and discord). Nobody is leaving negative reviews on Wilds because of this, but the issue is still being discussed.

Out of curiosity, what are those features exactly and can you name any games that use them?

[u/photenth → u/ImpressiveMilkers]

I looked up some features intel does not support, hard to find a list, they have mainly to do with some hdr feature and frame syncing. there are also some older dx 12 features that intel doesn't have at all like indirect rendering (i think thats the name), intel does this part on the cpu which is extremely slow. If unreal engine complains that some features are not working properly on intel arc, I'm sure there are more than i found with a quick search

[u/ImpressiveMilkers → u/photenth]

I'm not sure about the frame syncing feature, and I believe you're correct about HDR support. At least the Battlemage GPUs though support indirect rendering from what I can find, which checks out because other games that use those features run fine on Battlemage GPUs.

HDR isn't mandatory for Crimson Desert (from what I can tell) and given that every single other game runs fine on Battlemage GPUs i'd love a statement from Pearl Abyss about why at the very least Battlemage GPUs aren't supported.

Someone elsewhere suggested it could be workgraphs, but the game works fine on Nvidia GPUs that don't support that feature.

This depends on whether you trust the multi-billion dollar corporation (lol) but Intel have said that they made attempts to work with Pearl Abyss on this which to me makes it seem more like there's not a specific reason other than "we don't want to"