Intel suggests it was snubbed by Crimson Desert dev after reaching out "many times" about Arc GPUs – company says it provided "early hardware, drivers, and engineering resources" to studio

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Intel say it’s helped “test, validate, and optimize support for Intel graphics” in Crimson Desert

A screenshot of the Crimson Desert startup screen displaying an error message.
(Image credit: Future)

Crimson Desert, the new game from developer Pearl Abyss of Black Desert Online fame, launched today with a surprising caveat – the game doesn’t support Intel Arc graphics, one of which ranks among the best GPUs. It doesn’t seem like it will any time soon, either, with the game’s official FAQ suggesting that Intel Arc users seek out a refund. Intel has fired back, saying that it has reached out to Pearl Abyss “many times” and even provided the studio with early access to hardware and drivers across multiple Intel products.

Currently, if you try to launch Crimson Desert with an Arc GPU, you'll be presented with an error message that reads, "the graphics device is currently not supported." Although Pearl Abyss has said that Arc graphics aren't supported officially at this time, other users have encountered similar errors.

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On the Steam discussion boards, there are over 100 posts that reference this specific error, many of them seeing the error on AMD or Nvidia GPUs.

It's unclear if Pearl Abyss will add Arc support in the future, but the company's guidance for Arc users to consult the return policy of the platform they purchased the game on suggests support isn't coming soon. Intel, for its part, has put the blame back on the developer: "For details on the choice not to enable Intel support at launch, please reach out directly to Pearl Abyss."

Intel's discrete GPUs make up only a sliver of the total market. In JPR's most recent AIB report, Intel cracked just 1% of market share against AMD and Nvidia. However, Intel graphics extend far beyond the discrete desktop market, with Arc GPUs in Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, and Panther Lake laptops.

"Our teams are deeply committed to helping all studios deliver the best experience possible, providing open tools, documentation, and direct engineering support to make sure their games run well for everyone, including the tens of millions of players using Intel GPUs. We remain ready to assist Pearl Abyss however we can," wrote Intel.

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Jake Roach
Jake Roach
Senior Analyst, CPUs

Jake Roach is the Senior CPU Analyst at Tom’s Hardware, writing reviews, news, and features about the latest consumer and workstation processors.

14 Comments Comment from the forums
  • chaos215bar2
    Of course the blame is on the developer. The entire reason we have standardized graphics APIs is so that any game can run on any hardware meeting minimum support requirements without having to be built to run on specific GPUs. First, you build out the baseline functionality to the standard. Then, maybe, you add on extra bells and whistles for specific GPUs with proprietary extensions:

    Something seems to be fundamentally backwards about Crimson Desert's engine design if it's just giving up when running on hardware that hasn't been explicitly whitelisted.

    If the game was running, but hitting weird glitches or crashes, then maybe the blame could lie with Intel.
    Reply
  • usertests
    chaos215bar2 said:
    Something seems to be fundamentally backwards about Crimson Desert's engine design if it's just giving up when running on hardware that hasn't been explicitly whitelisted.
    They have their own bespoke engine: https://wccftech.com/crimson-desert-different-level-unreal-engine-5/
    I agree with your sentiment. There shouldn't have to be driver updates just for games to run or even be optimized.

    It's a bad situation that certainly isn't making it easier for competition in the GPU market. What if a game was released and it just ran on Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, Imagination, Lisuan, etc.
    Reply
  • Penfolduk
    Whilst in theory the standard APIs should make games agnostic to the type of graphics cards used, in practise it seems that games all seem to need hardware specific tweaks.

    And no one ever explains why.
    Is it that the underlying hardware architechtures are so different it requires different approaches with the APIs to get decent results out of them?

    Or are Devs effectively being bribed to favour one graphics architecture over another?

    And what does happen if you just write code that just uses API calls and is otherwise hardware agnostic?
    Reply
  • Cwiiis
    Penfolduk said:
    And no one ever explains why.
    Is it that the underlying hardware architechtures are so different it requires different approaches with the APIs to get decent results out of them?
    You've hit the nail on the head. Each GPU design is quite significantly different from the next and regardless of the hardware-agnostic API, different usage patterns can behave very differently on different hardware. I'm not up on the most modern GPUs, but if you aren't regularly testing on day one on all architectures, you can go far down a path that will be hard to rectify after the fact. For example, you may rely throughout your graphics pipeline on a certain usage of GPU compute that works significantly more efficiently on one architecture than another.

    With respect to Intel specifically, I expect it's a little bit of that (it seems like an interesting design that rewards smart usage of memory access and has excellent large transfer performance - but perhaps doesn't do so well with cache misses?) and a little bit of a premature driver issue (they've made great strides, but Nvidia and AMD have an insurmountable head start and huge market support).
    Reply
  • rluker5
    This sounds like a whitelist issue.

    Basically all games made before Arc was released weren't made to work with Intel dGPUs and basically all of them work on Intel dGPUs. GPUs aren't that different when it comes to raster. As evidence game mods care more about the game launcher than GPU brand when it comes to functionality.
    Fallout 3 has a whitelist and to use an Intel iGPU you need to add a file so the game thinks it is some weak Nvidia GPU. Then it runs fine.

    Can't make a game work if your brand is banned. Unless you have a mod to trick the game into lifting the ban.
    Reply
  • coolitic
    Penfolduk said:
    Whilst in theory the standard APIs should make games agnostic to the type of graphics cards used, in practise it seems that games all seem to need hardware specific tweaks.

    And no one ever explains why.
    Is it that the underlying hardware architechtures are so different it requires different approaches with the APIs to get decent results out of them?

    Or are Devs effectively being bribed to favour one graphics architecture over another?

    And what does happen if you just write code that just uses API calls and is otherwise hardware agnostic?
    You'd think you'd at least have a mode where you don't use vendor-specific tweaks, and just follow the specification in the most painless manner.

    Also, yes, certain GPU architectures have some preference for certain patterns, but it's also hard for me to see as that causing anything other than performance problems.
    Reply
  • mrdoc22
    Then we are back to 1992,
    with no standard graphicsdrivers to control the graphcscard,
    and must use "glide api" for control the "Voodoo" card.

    It was that Windows resolved with standard API "direct3D" for controlling the graphicscard.

    If they having problems with using a standard graphics API,
    they have some serious problems with they sourcecode for the game.
    (If the graphicscard have some extra features, then it's a option to use them,
    it should not be a requirement to play the game)
    Reply
  • yngndrw
    Penfolduk said:
    Whilst in theory the standard APIs should make games agnostic to the type of graphics cards used, in practise it seems that games all seem to need hardware specific tweaks.

    And no one ever explains why.
    Is it that the underlying hardware architechtures are so different it requires different approaches with the APIs to get decent results out of them?

    Or are Devs effectively being bribed to favour one graphics architecture over another?

    And what does happen if you just write code that just uses API calls and is otherwise hardware agnostic?
    In a word, performance.

    Anybody can make a game which works fine across all of the available GPUs (As long as there are no driver bugs), but if you want to push limits, then performance optimisation is key. These performance optimisations can be very specific to a particular architecture and are more important than ever with geometry shaders and ray tracing.

    Then of course you have manufacturers sponsoring a game, to ensure that they spend more time optimising for their platform.
    Reply
  • beyondlogic
    If intel has been snubbed for bending over backwards then that's just a poor showing by the company ATM intel has bought good faith in making the current GPUs there decent for the price it's a shame it hasn't netted more market share but I get a feeling with the strides there doing in software side that could change. At least there not releasing house fire cards.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    beyondlogic said:
    If intel has been snubbed for bending over backwards then that's just a poor showing by the company ATM intel has bought good faith in making the current GPUs there decent for the price it's a shame it hasn't netted more market share but I get a feeling with the strides there doing in software side that could change. At least there not releasing house fire cards.
    That's just how business goes, if the devs of crimson don't think there is a large enough market of people that have intel gpus in the first place, and then a large enough part of those that would actually buy the game, then it just doesn't make any sense for them to spend more money on supporting it than they would make from the potential sales.

    If intel makes a smash with nova lake and that gets adopted enough then more game devs will start supporting intel GPUs.
    Reply