Games crashing after Windows 11 update (KB5121003)

Windows update KB5121003 is breaking games that use DirectX 12 — typical symptoms are crash on launch, black screen after the logo, and GPU driver timeouts. Below is the fix for every major affected game.

Fix by game

• Phantom Blade Zero
• ARC Raiders
• Football Manager 27
• World of Warcraft
• The Finals

Why this happens

A graphics driver / DirectX runtime change shipped in the update. Games already installed rebuild their shader cache against the new runtime and hit a crash if the cache is stale.