WoW Forever: the graphics cards it will not support at launch

Blizzard said on 17 September that from the launch of WoW Forever, at 23:00 UK time on 4 November (midnight on 5 November in Central Europe), graphics cards built on certain older chip designs will no longer be supported. Blizzard says these cards fall well below the game's minimum hardware requirements. A card must be based on one of these chip designs or a newer one: AMD Graphics Core Next 1 (2012), NVIDIA Maxwell (2014) or Intel Skylake (2015). Players with an older card will need to upgrade it before playing. Blizzard adds that the vast majority of WoW players already use compatible hardware.

Blizzard's examples of cards that will work are the AMD Radeon HD 7850, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 9xx series, the GTX 750 and 750 Ti, and Intel HD Graphics 530. Its examples of cards that will not are the AMD Radeon HD 6950, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760, 770 and 780, the GTX 8xxM laptop cards and Intel HD Graphics 6000. What decides it is the chip design, not the model number or the year: the GTX 750 is supported while the higher-numbered GTX 760, 770 and 780 are not, and Blizzard dates both Intel examples to 2015. Blizzard also warns that even the cards it lists as compatible are still well below the game's minimum requirements, which are listed on the Battle.net Shop. To see which card you have in Windows, open Settings, then System, Display and Advanced display, or open Device Manager and expand Display adapters.

Blizzard links the rule to the game's new visual look. To support it, the game relies on a feature that Blizzard says graphics cards gained around 2012: RGBA16F UAV support in compute shaders, in plain terms a way for the card to work with colour data at higher precision. Blizzard says the change also gives players a more consistent experience. In a panel recap published on 12 September, Blizzard gave examples of the new look, such as flowing rivers in Elwynn Forest, mist on the water in Darkshore and moonlight through the trees of Ashenvale, and said players can choose modern or Classic visual presets. The requirements post makes no exception for either preset, and it does not mention the beta.

A video analysis of Forever's graphics published on 24 September calls the new look perhaps the biggest visual upgrade in the series' history. It finds most models and textures unchanged; what has changed is the light. Light now bounces off surfaces into shaded areas, worked out with ray tracing, a way of calculating light by following its rays; fog has depth and glows where light passes through it; shadows move with the sun; and the open sea has proper waves. The analysis says this ray tracing is Blizzard's own and built to stay playable on old cards, including ones without dedicated ray-tracing hardware. On a laptop with an RTX 4070 laptop graphics card at full HD (1080p), it measured around 70 to 80 frames per second in the open world with brief hitches, and lower frame rates with heavy stutter in busy cities, adding that this is a beta and performance may improve. This is an outside assessment, not Blizzard's.

Players testing the beta have raised the practical side on Blizzard's forums. Some wrote on 18 September that their frame rate fell the longer they stayed in the game and recovered after logging out and back in; one of them says their frame rate is otherwise very high compared with other versions of WoW. Others ask for a setting to turn the new fog, and the shafts of light through it, down or off. One says they could not find such a setting in the graphics menu, and several switch the fog off with a console command instead. These are players' reports, and Blizzard has not replied in those threads.