We may have dodged a bullet by going with 12th gen.
Owners of Intel’s latest 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 desktop processors have been noticing an increase in game crashes in recent months. It’s happening in games like The Finals, Fortnite, and Tekken 8, and has even led Epic Games to issue a support notice to encourage Intel Core i9 13900K and 14900K owners to adjust BIOS settings.
Now, Intel says it’s investigating the reports. “Intel is aware of problems that occur when executing certain tasks on 13th and 14th generation core processors for desktop PCs, and is analyzing them with major affiliates,” says an Intel spokesperson in a statement to ZDNet Korea.
The crashes vary in severity depending on the game, with some titles producing an “out of memory” error, others simply exiting out to the desktop, and some locking up a machine entirely. Most of the games affected seem to be based on the Unreal Engine, which could point to a stability issue that Intel needs to address.
The only workarounds that seem to improve stability involve manually downclocking or undervolting Intel’s processors. Epic Games has suggested changing the SVID behavior to Intel Fail Safe in the BIOS settings of Asus, Gigabyte, or MSI motherboards. Custom PC builders Power GPU recommend reducing the performance core ratio limit, which seems to help with stability in certain games.
Intel’s investigation comes just days after PCWorld had to swap out a Core i9 13900K processor to stop Fortnite from crashing on a writer’s PC. I’ve personally experienced game crashes on a 14900K system, and reducing the performance core ratio limit improved things on my own system. Intel has only confirmed an investigation so far, and it’s still not clear what the root cause of these game crashes is.
Fuck, I am indeed glad to not be chasing my tail over that. Unreal Engine sure is a piece of shit though. DA had CPU problems with that game (Borderlands 3/Unreal 4) and had to set affinity to not use all his AMD cores.
P.S. Also, it was Unreal 4 and 5 (in DX12 mode) that were hitting that occlusion query disordering problem for me on my old rig. No other games, directx 12 or otherwise. That POS engine caused work for me and I was lucky I was able to keep re-basing my patch. Time spent testing too when I could have just as easily not, and kept my shader caches etc.
See, Jay cares about optimizing for temperature over performance. He's admitting his CPU isn't doing as much work with his settings, with lower cinebench scores. That doesn't matter to him (and likely his audience) because it's not a realistic load. Cranking up the limits doesn't make their games and applications run faster. However, it is precisely a realistic load for me!
I want my builds to complete faster and if a core spikes to 100 and gets briefly throttled, I'm still getting as much work done as the CPU can possibly do. I'm stable, I'd be corrupting data doing sustained builds at -j24 (in fact I was when my bios configuration got invisibly messed up and needed defaults reloaded). If the cores aren't maxed out, then they aren't running at max frequency (e.g. idling at 800 MHz and 25C) so it only comes into play when I am compiling. As I discovered after watching his first video about this stuff, my board did have very aggressive wattage limit settings, governed by that "cooler type" setting which defaults to "liquid cooling" and insane, practically non-existent limits. However, even with that enabled until someone clicks the overclock profile button it wouldn't really do any harm.
This is in general with his videos decrying motherboard settings, not specific to mitigating that game crashing issue (which this may not actually solve as it happens with stock settings on some of those CPUs).
