WoW: Forever Drops Kepler GPUs but Keeps Older Radeon GCN

Blizzard has published a GPU architecture cutoff for World of Warcraft: Forever. At launch, supported hardware must be based on AMD Graphics Core Next 1, NVIDIA Maxwell or Intel Skylake graphics, or a newer architecture from the same vendor.

That produces an unusual-looking compatibility list. Blizzard names the Radeon HD 7850 from 2012 and GeForce GTX 750/750 Ti from 2014 as compatible examples, while GeForce GTX 760, GTX 770 and GTX 780 cards are unsupported. The difference is not a claim that the HD 7850 is faster than a GTX 780. Blizzard says the updated visuals rely on RGBA16F UAV support in compute shaders, and the architecture cutoff follows that required feature.

Blizzard makes a second distinction that is easy to lose in a compatibility headline: the architecture cutoff is not the same thing as the game’s minimum hardware specification. The company explicitly says its compatible legacy examples remain well below the minimum requirements for World of Warcraft: Forever.

In practice, the cutoff answers whether the graphics architecture exposes the feature Blizzard needs to support the new rendering path. The minimum specification answers a different question about the level of hardware Blizzard considers suitable for the game. A Radeon HD 7850 surviving the feature cutoff therefore should not be read as a performance recommendation for the updated client.

For NVIDIA users, the practical boundary is especially visible because Maxwell survives while Kepler does not. A GTX 750 or GTX 750 Ti is Maxwell-based and appears on Blizzard’s compatible list, but the faster-in-many-older-games GTX 760, GTX 770 and GTX 780 belong to Kepler and are explicitly listed as unsupported examples.

AMD’s boundary reaches farther back: Blizzard accepts first-generation GCN, including the Radeon HD 7850 example. Intel support starts with Skylake graphics, with HD Graphics 530 listed as compatible while HD Graphics 6000 is listed as unsupported. Anyone near these boundaries should identify the actual GPU architecture rather than judging compatibility from model number, release year or historical gaming performance alone.

Blizzard says RGBA16F UAV support in compute shaders is used by World of Warcraft: Forever’s updated visual look and that requiring it provides a more consistent experience. The company says the vast majority of World of Warcraft players already use compatible hardware.

For owners of unsupported legacy GPUs, this is therefore a hard compatibility issue rather than a suggestion to lower graphics settings. Blizzard says those players will need to upgrade their graphics hardware before playing World of Warcraft: Forever. For compatible legacy hardware below the minimum specification, the support statement establishes feature compatibility but not a guaranteed performance target.