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Intel Arc GPUs can finally boot up and play 'Crimson Desert' — but you'll probably want to wait for official support
Intel Arc GPU owners can finally play Crimson Desert on their GPUs two weeks after the developers initially stated Arc GPUs would not be supported in-game. On the Intel Arc subreddit, gamers have found that Intel's latest driver 32.0.101.8629 can now technically run the game without crashing to the desktop for at least some users.
Gamers who have successfully booted the game on the subreddit report good performance with the new driver. One user claims they achieved nearly 60 FPS at 1440p ultra settings with an Arc B580, and another achieved playable performance on an Arc Pro B50 at 1080p high quality settings with ray tracing turned on.
However, game support is far from perfect; game crashing still occurs with some Arc owners, and turning on FSR also causes the game to crash. Visual artifacts are also prevalent, especially on characters' faces. These problems explain why Crimson Desert support is not stated in the driver's patch notes. The only update Intel added to the patch notes is game-ready support for its Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 discrete GPUs.
Regardless, the game is at least playable for a minority of Arc GPU owners. Before the update, the game would not boot up for anyone with an Arc GPU and would show an incompatibility error message.
Back in late March, the development team behind Crimson Desert announced Arc GPU support would not be added to the game and even went so far as to recommend Arc GPU owners refund their graphics cards. Intel punched back at the devs, revealing to Tom's Hardware that it reached out to the team "many times" to provide assistance to make the game compatible with Intel GPUs.
This back-and-forth led the developers to backtrack on their statement and begin working on compatibility and optimizations for Intel Arc GPUs. Official support is hopefully coming soon, but in the meantime, if you are an Arc owner, you can at least try to boot the game with Intel's latest driver if you don't want to wait for official support.
