Intel is selling defective 13-14th Gen CPUs – game developers are losing patience
The Australian game development studio Alderon Games published an article on its website with the loud headline “Intel is selling defective 13-14th Gen CPUs”, as reported by The Register.
Alderon Games is an indie studio that, according to Linkedin, has 32 employees and specializes in the development of multiplayer games on the Unreal Engine. In his article on the website, the studio’s founder Matthew Cassells describes the problems the studio faced when working with Intel hardware.
“My team at Alderon Games, working on the multiplayer dinosaur survival game Path of Titans, has been encountering significant problems with Intel CPU stability,” says Cassells. “These issues, including crashes, instability, and memory corruption, are confined to the 13th and 14th generation processors. Despite all released microcode, BIOS, and firmware updates, the problem remains unresolved.”
The first mentions of problems with Raptor Lake processors began to appear in the spring of this year. Most attention was paid to the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K, Intel’s top-of-the-line models, but there are some reports that the stripped-down Core i7-13700K and Core i7-14700K also have problems.
One indication of these stability issues on Raptor Lake is the “not enough video memory” error message in games running the Unreal Engine. 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-based PCs. The developer says that servers running on these Intel processors have experienced “constant crashes”.
Intel has tried to solve the problem with a new microcode that is distributed through motherboard BIOS updates, and has also advised motherboard manufacturers not to enable extreme power consumption modes by default.
For example, in some cases, MSI motherboards set a power limit of 4096 watts and 512 amps, no Intel processor will ever use all this power. But this reportedly limits the chip’s automatic frequency boosting technology, leading to crashes.
However, stability problems are still observed and Intel does not disclose their cause.
“We appreciate the Intel community’s patience on the matter and will share more details on the investigation as soon as possible. In the interim, we continue recommending that customers experiencing these issues please reach out to Intel customer support for next steps regarding their Intel Core 13th or 14th Gen (K/KF/KS) desktop processors,” Intel reports.
Alderon Games has apparently lost patience with Raptor Lake processors and says it is switching all of its servers to AMD processors because they “experience 100 times fewer crashes compared to Intel CPUs that were found to be defective.”
Cassells also recommends that players, whether they are hosting their own servers or just playing games, avoid Raptor Lake processors. The developer has even implemented an in-game alert to let its users know that 13th and 14th generation Intel chips are not suitable for gaming.