Video Game Developer Reports 50% Failure Rate For Intel Core i9 Raptor Lake CPUs

For months now, it’s been reported that Intel Core i9-13900K and 14900K CPUs have been exhibiting instability in gaming. The reports have led to a flurry of bad press for Intel and several attempts by the company to rectify the issue. Still, this whole time, it’s been unclear how many CPUs were actually exhibiting this behavior. We will never know the true answer to that question, but now an Unreal Engine developer has shared the failure rate his studio has experienced, and it’s a shocking 50%.
The developer making these claims is a director at ModelFarm, an Unreal Engine animation studio. He posted about his studio’s experience on X in the wake of Intel finally addressing the issue yesterday after a prolonged silence. The post on X was flagged by Tom’s Hardware. In the thread, he says some of the Core i9 CPUs experienced the type of instability reported in games almost immediately, but some CPUs took their time to exhibit any issues. He notes the “failure” he’s referring to is games crashing and generally being unstable, which is what has been reported since April.
Interestingly, he says he’s reporting the behavior he witnessed four months ago, as he’s been away from the office for several months working on a project, so the timeline matches the original reporting date. He notes the company also has Intel Core i9 CPUs that are totally fine, so the problem is difficult to pin down. The studio has even lowered the power limits on some of them but to no avail. He says the timeline over which the instability began to appear is over roughly a year, while some were twitchy right from the get-go.
As far as a remedy goes, the developer says that instead of waiting until mid-August for a fix from Intel, it’s already begun switching its systems to AMD CPUs since it prizes stability over all other factors. He notes any new machines built will be deployed with AMD’s upcoming Zen 5 Ryzen 9 9950X, which is due to launch on July 31. He says they’re not ditching their Core i9 systems, so it’s assumed they’ll be patching them in mid-August when Intel releases the microcode update to resolve the issue. According to Intel, the culprit is an algorithm in the CPU requesting incorrect voltages from the motherboard.
ExtremeTech supports Group Black and its mission to increase greater diversity in media voices and media ownerships.
© 2001-2024 Ziff Davis, LLC., a Ziff Davis company. All Rights Reserved.
ExtremeTech is a federally registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission. The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the endorsement of ExtremeTech. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product or service, we may be paid a fee by that merchant.

source