World-of-warcraft – Nvidia Quadro FX 1700 graphics card rejected by latest WoW update – suggestions please

graphics cardworld of warcraft

After downloading the latest WoW update, we got the unpleasant surprise that our Nvidia Quadro FX 1700 card is apparently no longer supported. (Everything worked fine until the day before)

3d accelerator card not supported

I tried downloading the original driver from the company, still no go.

I went to a shop looking to buy a newer card, but they told me that most likely my old computer's motherboard would not support the current generation of graphics cards.

After further research, I found that the Nvidia Quadro that I have uses PCI-express 1.0 x16, while modern cards that were for sale in the shop use e.g. PCIe 3.0

Can anyone advise, please?

  1. Does anyone know if it's possible to tweak the system so that WoW can still run with the old Nvidia Quadro FX 1700? (I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the list of old cards still supported by WoW includes models that aren't much better than Quadro FX 1700)

https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/76459

  1. If our almost 10 years old motherboard supports PCIe 1.0 x16, will it support new (PCIe 3.0) graphics cards too? Or is there probably going to be some compatibility issue?

(I don't have the computer with me, I am advising a non-technical friend, and so right now I can't look inside the computer to see what motherboard it has. But perhaps for some of you experts, the above info contains enough clues for giving some educated advice.)

Another option would be to to look for used but more recent cards than the Quadro, which although old would still be supported by WoW. Any advice in that regard?

Best Answer

Blizzard is aware that some older DirectX 11 cards without Shader Model 5 support are no longer compatible after the updates. They are working on a fix that will allow players to continue to play on older cards, but it will take a couple weeks for them to implement this.

https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/issues-with-older-gpus/193865

For the last few expansions, World of Warcraft minimum specs have required a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) that is shader-model-5 compatible (DirectX 11.0 or higher). With the newer graphical features included in the Shadowlands Pre-patch, the game has ceased supporting all GPUs that are not compatible with shader-model-5.

We’ve discovered that a very small number of players are attempting to run World of Warcraft on older hardware that cannot play the game after patching.

At this time, we’re working on a solution that could allow the game to operate on some older hardware, at the lowest graphical settings, with some graphic features unavailable. We expect this solution to take at least a couple of weeks to develop and test.

We will let you know when this workaround is available. Thank you.

However, according to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10467072/can-i-put-a-pci-e-3-0-x16-gpu-in-a-pci-e-1-0-x16-slot, PCIE 3.0 is backwards compatible with 1.0, so you should be able to put a modern PCIE 3.0 card in your older motherboard. Whether that's a good idea, considering your CPU would most likely be heavily bottlenecked by your CPU and the lower bandwidth of PCI-E 1.0, is up for debate, but it is an option.

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