"Your 3D accelerator card is not supported by World of Warcraft"

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This error began to appear after the latest content patch last week. My computer is in fact incredibly old so I’m not really surprised, but I was hoping I’d encounter this later rather than sooner, like maybe at the release of the next expansion and not right at the epilogue of this one. The official system requirements support page was last updated five months ago, but I’d been playing the game just fine as recently as ten days ago so I’m curious if there was a system change that wasn’t in the latest patch notes. Full disclosure: I have a feeling I know what the answer to this problem is gonna be, but I’m trying to exhaust all my options in case there’s chance I can keep playing for a little longer.

My computer is basically at-or-just-below the current minimum specifications for retail WoW. Obviously, I have to play with fairly low settings but the game nevertheless runs, or at least it did until this patch. You can have a field day with my system specs:

• Windows 7 x64 SP1
• x2 ATI Radeon HD 5770’s operating in crossfire.
• 8GB RAM
• Intel 4-Core i5-750 clocked to 3.21 GHz
• Solid State Drives, at least.

Yeah yeah, I know it’s old, but it can still handle basically anything that runs on DX11 just fine. I dunno if anybody needs to look at a full DXDiag report, but for now here are the contents of [Retail WoW]\Logs\gx.log. It says it couldn’t identify my GPU as the DX11 device that it in fact is… :thinking:

1/22 13:50:34.906  LogOpen
1/22 13:50:34.906  World of Warcraft Retail x86_64 10.2.5.53007
1/22 13:50:34.906  Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (6.1.7601) x86_64
1/22 13:50:34.906  Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU         750  @ 2.67GHz | Sockets:1 Cores:4 Threads:4 | Max Frequency: 2.7GHz
1/22 13:50:34.906  8.0 GB System Memory
1/22 13:50:34.906  On AC Power - Battery Not Present
1/22 13:50:34.978  Invalid: D3D11CreateDevice Failed (AGSReturnCode:0x00000006)
1/22 13:50:34.978  Invalid: D3D12CreateDevice Failed (HR:0x887A0004) Unknown error 0x887A0004
1/22 13:50:34.978  Adapter 0: "AMD Radeon HD 5700 Series" family:Unknown type:Discrete location:1 driver_date:26-Feb-2016 driver_ver:(0x80011000a0599) vendor:0x1002 device:0x68b8 dx11:false dx12:false
1/22 13:50:34.978  No suitable gpu found. World of Warcraft cannot proceed. Exiting application...

I have already tried several typical solutions:
• Adding “-d3d11” as a launch option. Doesn’t work.
• Completely changing video card drivers. Didn’t make a difference.
• Installing the DirectX SDK (Jun 2010) just to get the DXCPL utility. Didn’t do anything.

Is there anything else I could try, or have I finally reached the end of the line?

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I think it was just formatting changes or updating links, because all older versions dating back through Feb 2023 look the same.

Unfortunately, the 5770s fall a ways below the options for minimum hardware. Here’s a chart to compare: https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/3295vs4265vs2502vs6/GeForce-GTX-950-vs-Intel-Iris-Xe-vs-Radeon-HD-7790-vs-Radeon-HD-5770. I selected the lowest GTX 900 series I could, a 7790 because that’s when the GCN nomenclature started, and the base Iris Xe.

Minimum specs just mean the game developers are optimizing the content for that hardware and up. Troubleshooting older hardware isn’t officially supported by Blizz, but doesn’t mean you can’t get it working on your own after some research.

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Since I still have an HD 5770 sitting in the closet and have some downtime, I grabbed it out of the box and put it in my old SFF PC that I use with my CRT TV since that most convenient and is also of almost near-similar vintage (and is at least as close as I have because I never bought anything on 1156).

It has Windows 10 Pro 22H2 on it though. But, the HD 5770 does work with the latest patch, at least on this system.
This is the driver used; it’s the latest beta drivers from AMD for Windows 10 for the HD 5xxx series (Crimson Edition 16.2.1 Beta):

Here’s some images of it running (note that the TV is a 4:3 CRT HDTV).


It defaulted to DX11, and I didn’t check if DX11 Legacy works still or not on it.

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WoW still works on pretty much any card that supports at least DirectX 10 (DirectX 11 can run on DirectX 10 and 10.1 hardware because DirectX 11 is a strict superset of DirectX 10 and compatibility is a simple matter of shedding the small subset of unsupported features). I recently tested it on a Radeon 4850, a DirectX 10.1 card that is older, using older drivers, than your 5770, and it still worked. You will get a notice when you start the game about the video drivers being old, but you can just click OK and continue on into the game.

But there are bigger issues at play with the OP’s system.

The 5770 was a budget card even when it was brand new, in 2009. Using it 15 years later would suck. Presumably your logic was to use two of them in Crossfire to mitigate the poor performance. The only problem is, WoW doesn’t support Crossfire anymore. Crossfire only works in exclusive fullscreen. WoW stopped using exclusive fullscreen 4 or 5 expansions ago. Now the only way you can run WoW “fullscreen” is to run it in a borderless Window. Crossfire doesn’t work in a borderless window. So you might have two 5770s in your system, but WoW is never using more than one of them. SLI still works however, but not crossfire.

Furthermore, the 5770 only came in two variants, a 512mb and 1GB version. Even if you have the 1GB version, that’s simply not enough Video RAM for WoW anymore. You would have to resort to doing things like keeping your view distance at a minimum and probably using a render scale under 100% just to keep your card from hitting 100% VRam usage. I dealt with this in my secondary system which until fairly recently was still using 3x GTX680 in SLI. I could get away with that since SLI supports being used with a borderless window, but I was still limited to 2GB of VRam and I was really having to go out of my way not to hit that limit.

Also,

8GB System RAM is not good enough for any system which will be playing games these days. I have my doubts that you would even be able to play WoW with things like Discord open and not max out your RAM or come uncomfortably close. You can get DDR3 very very cheap these days. Even if you can’t afford a new system, you should be able to upgrade to 16GB, especially if you still have extra slots free.

An i5-750 is a horrible CPU especially for a game that is so CPU limited. If nothing else, max out that system by buying an i7-870, which you can buy for like $10 on eBay these days.

Why in the world are you still running Windows 7? You should upgrade to Windows 10. You could even upgrade to Windows 11 (despite your system not meeting the official Windows 11 requirements) via the use of any of the many system requirements bypass methods. Doing this, I’ve even got Windows 11 running on a Pentium 4.

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