GoKawiilIf 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."
This is the error that Crimson Desert pops up when you attempt to play on an Intel Arc B580, even with the latest driver. (Image credit: Future)
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.
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From the Crimson Desert FAQ. (Image credit: Future)
Recommending that users return the game if they have specific hardware is surprising, especially considering that Intel actually ships the largest number of graphics processors for PCs. While it's true that Intel Arc discrete cards barely manage a percentage point of market share, there are a whole lot of systems out there with Intel CPUs and no discrete GPUs. All Intel CPUs from Meteor Lake onwards use some variation of an Arc graphics architecture, and Intel actually has the fastest integrated GPU right now with its Core Ultra 300H series processors, but users hoping to play Crimson Desert on integrated Intel graphics are also left out in the cold.
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:
On the Steam discussion boards, there are many posts of users with Radeon RX and GeForce RTX graphics cards getting the same error as Arc gamers. (Image credit: Future)
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.
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