Pearl Abyss says to roll back your GPU driver if you're struggling to get Crimson Desert working on your ROG Xbox Ally X

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Though a fix is seemingly in the works.

Asus ROG Xbox Ally X and ROG Ally X handheld gaming PCs
(Image credit: Future)

Crimson Desert is one of those games that seems to be able to wrangle together all kinds of disparate gamers to attempt to master the bizarre behemoth of a multi-tool RPG. So it's a little unfortunate that it has had far from perfect hardware support. We witnessed the game's lack of Intel Arc support ourselves, and now Pearl Abyss and Asus are saying ROG Xbox Ally X devices might need to roll back their drivers to launch the game.

In its list of known issues, the game developer and publisher, Pearl Abyss, says: "We have identified an issue where Crimson Desert is not launching properly on ROG Xbox Ally X running on the latest driver version. Microsoft and AMD are currently looking into the issue. Until the issue is resolved, we recommend installing and using the driver version immediately prior to the latest one, available on the Asus website."

Asus reiterates the same and provides a download link that, uhh, doesn't work. If you want to download the driver to roll it back, go to the ROG Xbox Ally X driver and tools page, scroll down to Graphics, click See All Downloads, and download the driver Version V32.0.21025.27003.

It's never a nice feeling to have to roll back your drivers, but Pearl Abyss assures us that this is only until the issue is resolved. And if a driver rollback really does work to get the game launching on the Microsoft-Asus handheld, there's good reason to think it can get up and running on the latest drivers with a little work, too.

(Image credit: Future)

Hopefully, these compatibility issues will be resolved quickly. And ditto the Intel Arc ones, given after the initial issues were spotted, Pearl Abyss said it will work on bringing support for the GPUs to the game, and Intel told us it "remains ready to assist Pearl Abyss however we can."

Even if the game does work on your hardware, although general performance seems to be smooth, plenty of people have reported that the game is a little graphically glitchy, blurry, and so on. In which case, I suppose it's good news that the devs are actively working on improving things.

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Jacob Fox
Jacob Fox
Hardware Writer

Jacob got his hands on a gaming PC for the first time when he was about 12 years old. He swiftly realised the local PC repair store had ripped him off with his build and vowed never to let another soul build his rig again. With this vow, Jacob the hardware junkie was born. Since then, Jacob's led a double-life as part-hardware geek, part-philosophy nerd, first working as a Hardware Writer for PCGamesN in 2020, then working towards a PhD in Philosophy for a few years while freelancing on the side for sites such as TechRadar, Pocket-lint, and yours truly, PC Gamer. Eventually, he gave up the ruthless mercenary life to join the world's #1 PC Gaming site full-time. It's definitely not an ego thing, he assures us.

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