One game developer says it’s had enough of Intel’s 13th and 14th generation Core microprocessors, calling them “defective.”
Australia-based indie developer studio Alderon Games vented its frustrations over Intel’s latest chips in an article titled “Intel Selling Faulty 13-14th Gen CPUs”, written by the studio’s founder Matthew Cassells.
“My team at Alderon Games, working on the multiplayer dinosaur survival game Path of Titans, has experienced significant issues with the stability of Intel CPUs,” he said. “These issues, including crashes, instability, and memory corruption, are limited to the 13th and 14th generation processors. Despite all the microcode, BIOS, and firmware updates released, the issue remains unresolved.”
Stability issues on Raptor Lake processors first gained widespread attention in February, and have been linked to some of the first 13th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs launched in late 2022. Intel’s top-of-the-line Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K appear to be the most affected, with some reports claiming the slimmed-down Core i7-13700K and Core i7-14700K are also having issues.
One of the telling signs of these stability issues on Raptor Lake is the “out of video memory” error that’s been popping up in games like Fortnite. Cassells claims that his studio has received thousands of crash reports from players using 13th and 14th generation Core chips, and that his development team has personally experienced “frequent instability” on their own Raptor Lake-powered PCs. The studio founder says that servers running on these Intel CPUs have been experiencing “constant crashes.”
Intel has attempted to address these issues with new microcode distributed via BIOS updates to motherboards. Intel has also instructed motherboard manufacturers not to enable extreme power modes by default.
For example, in some cases MSI motherboards impose a power limit of 4,096 watts and 512 amps; no Intel CPU would ever use all that power, but it places almost no limitations on a chip’s automatic frequency boosting technology, and that seems to result in crashes.
However, there are still stability issues and Intel hasn’t been entirely forthcoming about the cause.
“Intel and its partners continue to investigate user reports of instability issues on Intel Core 13th and 14th Generation (K/KF/KS) desktop processors,” the company told The register.
“We appreciate the Intel community’s patience with this matter and will share more details about the investigation as soon as possible. In the meantime, we encourage customers experiencing these issues to contact Intel Customer Support for next steps regarding their Intel Core 13th or 14th Gen (K/KF/KS) desktop processors.”
We are switching to AMD
However, Cassells suspects there is a larger underlying problem than just the instability issues solved by the motherboard configuration.
“Over the last 3-4 months, we have seen that CPUs that initially worked fine, degrade over time and eventually fail,” he claims. “The failure rate we have observed in our own testing is close to 100%, indicating that it is only a matter of time before the affected CPUs fail.”
By the way, this vulture happened to give his old Intel Core i9-13900K to an acquaintance a few weeks ago, and it no longer works. This 13900K went into a gaming PC with a lower-end motherboard that by design cannot take full advantage of the chip’s power consumption. Previously, it worked flawlessly in SSD and GPU tests.
Alderon Games seems to have lost patience with Raptor Lake CPUs, saying it will be replacing all of its servers with AMD processors. These processors are said to have “100x fewer crashes compared to Intel CPUs that were found to be defective.”
Cassells also advises players, whether they’re hosting their own servers or just playing a game, to avoid Raptor Lake processors. The developer has even implemented an in-game notification to tell users that 13th and 14th generation Intel chips are no good.
The register has contacted Alderon Games for further comment. ®