World of Warcraft: Forever drops support for older GPU architectures

New minimum GPU requirements

Blizzard announces that when World of Warcraft: Forever launches, GPUs based on certain older graphics architectures that fall well below the game's minimum hardware requirements will no longer be supported. Players will need a GPU based on one of the following microarchitectures or newer.

In general, this means a graphics card from a newer generation is required. Players with an older card will need to upgrade their GPU before playing World of Warcraft: Forever. Blizzard notes that the vast majority of World of Warcraft players already use compatible hardware.

Players who are not sure which GPU their computer uses can check in Windows in two ways, and can use the following examples as a general reference. These cards are still well below the minimum requirements for the game.

• AMD Graphics Core Next 1 (2012)
• NVIDIA Maxwell (2014)
• Intel Skylake (2015)
• To check your GPU in Windows: open Settings, select System, then Display, and choose Advanced display to view the GPU's make and model, or open Device Manager and expand Display adapters
• Example compatible cards: AMD Radeon HD 7850 (2012), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 9xx and 750/750 Ti (2014), Intel HD Graphics 530 (2015)
• Example unsupported cards: AMD Radeon HD 6950 (2010), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760/770/780 and GTX 8xxM (2014), Intel HD Graphics 6000 (2015)

Why these features are required

World of Warcraft: Forever introduces a new visual look to the game. To support that update, Blizzard relies on a feature introduced to GPUs around 2012: RGBA16F UAV support in compute shaders.

Blizzard states this change supports the updated visual look and provides a more consistent experience for players. The full minimum system requirements can be viewed on the Battle.net Shop.