Blizzard Entertainment says World of Warcraft: Forever will stop supporting some older GPU architectures when it launches.

The architecture cutoff starts at AMD Graphics Core Next 1 (2012), NVIDIA Maxwell (2014) and Intel Skylake (2015), according to Blizzard Entertainment. A graphics card must use one of those architectures or a newer one.

Architecture support alone does not establish that a card meets the game's minimum requirements. Blizzard Entertainment lists the Radeon HD 7850, GeForce GTX 9xx, 750/750 Ti and Intel HD Graphics 530 as compatible examples, while stressing that these remain below the minimum.

Among the unsupported examples, Blizzard Entertainment names the Radeon HD 6950, GeForce GTX 760/770/780, GTX 8xxM and Intel HD Graphics 6000. Players with cards using older microarchitectures will need a hardware upgrade before they can play Forever.

Behind the cutoff is a graphics feature: RGBA16F UAV support in compute shaders. Blizzard Entertainment says the feature arrived around 2012 and is needed for Forever's updated visual look, with the change also supporting a more consistent player experience.

To identify an installed GPU in Windows, Blizzard Entertainment points players to Advanced display, reached through Settings, System and Display. Alternatively, expanding Display adapters in Device Manager shows the graphics hardware installed in the computer.