A Counterintuitive Hardware Cutoff

This lineup proved so confusing that, after Blizzard released the official hardware specification for World of Warcraft: Forever, gamers immediately got to work cross-referencing their GPU model number. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 found itself immediately in the unsupported category; a card once sat at the top of all modern benchmarks still performs like a demon. Followed:

If you come from a background where you measure GPU life in horsepower (CUDA cores, memory bandwidth, teraflops), that is seemingly a bug. It’s not. Forever’s list of compatible cards is based on a single design element, not horsepower, and once you know what that is, the omission of the GTX 780 begins to add up.

The Technical Reason: RGBA16F UAV Support

The #1 requirement behind everything is the support for RGBA 16F UAV in compute shaders. This is a relatively obscure feature: it takes the ability for a compute shader to write to a 16-bit floating-point RGBA texture as a random access resource, which Forever’s revamped renderer needs to do its new lighting and other effects.

This feature, generalised atomics, began to show up widely in GPU architectures by 2012, but not all architectures that launched that year adopted it. That’s the problem.

AMD’s GCN 1 architecture (initially implemented in early 2012 in the Radeon HD 7000 series) had all the right compute shader functionality from day 1. So even an aging piece of kit like the HD 7850 easily passes the threshold.

The GTX 600 and 700 series cards (which include the GTX 780) were released at roughly the same time as Forever’s powered renderer, but don’t have this capability on the card. Kepler cards are ignored for this, no matter how high performance (GTX 750, GTX 750 Ti are the exception to the rule within their generation as they use the Maxwell architecture).

Intel also follows the same for the graphics: Skylake-generation (2015) and newer clears this requirement, but older Intel integrated graphics.

In brief, the point is not how fast a chip launched, or how well it did gaming-wise; it’s whether that advanced silicon generation used this particular compute shader feature.

The Full Compatibility List (and How to Check Your GPU)

Per the published data of Blizzard, the architecture floor of the game World of Warcraft: Forever is like that:

Supported (minimum architecture or newer):

AMD Graphics Core Next 1 (2012), e.g. Radeon HD 7850

NVIDIA Maxwell (2014), e.g. GTX 750, GTX 750 Ti, GTX 900 range. This is NVIDIA’s current (as of October 2018) budget-range GPU.

Intel Skylake, e.g. Intel HD Graphics 530

Unsupported, even though they’re technically “newer” or comparable in performance:

NVIDIA Kepler GTX 760, GTX 770, GTX 780 and pretty much all the GTX 600/700 series.

NVIDIA GTX 8xxM mobile/laptop GPUs

Intel HD Graphics 6000 and below.

AMD architectures before GCN 1, for example the Radeon HD 6950

If you’re unclear as to what your computer actually contains, Windows allows you to check without opening the case:

If you navigate to Settings → System → Display →Advanced display information should be displayed, indicating your GPU.

Device Manager → Display adapters does the same. Speed-wise, this is faster to get to.

Another way to find this out is to, after you get the name of the model, Google it, and the first thing that should come up is which generation architecture it’s. That is the number that counts here, not the model number.

Minimum Spec vs. Support Cutoff: Two Different Lines.

This is one point of quite a lot of community confusion, because Blizzard actually has two different published thresholds, and they get mixed.

The support cutoff GCN 1 / Maxwell / Skylake is the architecture threshold. If you’re below this line, a game will refuse to start regardless of your settings. This is a strict technical barrier connected to the RGBA16F UAV criterion:

The official minimum Spec was an entirely different, much higher target; Blizzard’s “official recommended default” begins at roughly the GTX 10 series, AMD’s RDNA 1, and Intel’s Xe2-LPG. This is the level considered by Blizzard to be the minimum for a playable experience, where frame rate is smooth, raids, cities, and the like are reliably stable, and visual features operate as expected:

That means we have a useful gray zone: any GPU that clears the architecture cutoff but is below the official minimum spec. Cards like the GTX 900 series, the HD 7850, or early Skylake integrated graphics is in this territory. They will run and fire up the game, but you’d be far below the target experience Blizzard actually recommends.

A Decision Setup for Upgrading

If you’re looking for a more digestible version, then it boils down to three cases in your own circumstances:

Your GPU is between the support cutoff and the official minimum spec.

You will be able to play. Graphics will likely need to be turned down, mainly anything related to the new lighting and shadows, and don’t anticipate a lag-free experience in giant raids or crowded zones.

Your GPU falls into the completely below support cutoff category.

There is no workaround here. It’s not a matter of some slider not being adjusted low enough – this game simply needs compute shader support in the architecture of your card that you don’t have, period. No way around it, get yourself a new card; whatever it’s done so far with Retail or Classic.

You’re shopping for a replacement, in particular secondhand.

Architecture is much more important than pure benchmark scores in this particular situation. For NVIDIA, that includes anything Maxwell or later (GTX 900 series or later) over a Kepler generation GPU, even if the Kepler GPU is faster in general benchmarking. The same applies to AMD and Intel; note the architecture generation, not the model or MSRP.

What This Means Moving on

For long-time WoW players, especially those who hunt WoW Forever Gold or browse MMOEXP game marketplace, this is an indicator that “the game still runs on my old rig” has an “expiration date” that isn’t always linked to clearly diminishing performance. A card may still be able to push decent frame rates in other titles and still get struck off here, just because of a missing feature of a given point in GPU history.

This is not only a good own-mountain experience, but also a case study of interest outside WoW: as more and more advanced rendering methods are relying on features of the compute shader, architecture generation, a factor independent of the age or power of the card, is becoming a much more accurate indicator of compatibility than specs or game age. Those who decide whether to keep an old GPU for this game, or the next, are advised to consider what features a card’s architecture supports, rather than what specs.