A D3D11-compatible GPU (Feature Level 11.0, Shader Model 5.0) is required to run the engine

“A D3D11-compatible GPU (Feature Level 11.0, Shader Model 5.0) is required to run the engine”
This error message is common for UE4 games and in theory it should indicate that your GPU is too old, while actually the problem might be something else.
Here is an example:
The user reports that he had no problem playing a game and later the same day he got this error message for no logical reason. He solved it by upgrading the video driver. But why did this error appear in the first place considering the game was running fine on the older driver before? Perhaps the game had been updated and system requirements had been updated too. And there are many more such cases.

As far as I understand the engine can make some compability checks on launching and prevent a game from running if the system doesn’t meet the specified system requirements even if a game is technically capable of running in the existing environment. The message itself is misleading and doesn’t help to determine the actual problem.

The question is, is there a way to bypass/trick these checks and forcefully run a game ignoring this message? Does such a launching parameter exist? Can developers set any checks they want or there is some documented list of available checks?

Hi there @thug_8

I recall someone running into this on a game a while back and I THINK they changed it to run in DirectX 12 instead of 11 and the error stopped. Have you tried that, by chance?

@FrostyJas Hi. Sure, using -dx12 parameter helps in some cases. Using DXVK can also solve the problem. But these are just workarounds. I’m looking for a way to forcefully launch any game in DX11 mode ignoring this message to either make sure this is a false error or to see a real crash with a log or informative error mesage which would help to determine a real cause of the problem.

What is the GPU you’re currently using with this?