Game developer accuses Intel of selling ‘defective’ Raptor Lake processors • The Register


A game developer says he is fed up with Intel’s 13th and 14th generation Core microprocessors, calling them “flawed.”

Australian-based independent development studio Alderon Games has aired its frustrations with Intel’s latest chips in a writing titled “Intel is selling faulty 13th and 14th generation processors,” written by the studio’s founder, Matthew Cassells.

“My team at Alderon Games, working on the multiplayer survival game Path of Titans, is experiencing significant issues with Intel CPU stability,” he said. “These issues, including crashes, instability, and memory corruption, are limited to 13th and 14th generation processors. Despite all the microcode, BIOS, and firmware updates released, the issue remains unresolved.”

Stability issues with Raptor Lake processors first came to public attention in February and have been linked to some of the first 13th-gen Raptor Lake processors released 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 indicating that the scaled-down Core i7-13700K and Core i7-14700K are also experiencing issues.

One telltale sign of these stability issues on Raptor Lake is the “insufficient video memory” error message that appears in games like Fortnite. Cassells says his studio has received thousands of crash reports from players using 13th and 14th generation Core chips, and his development team has personally experienced “frequent instability” on their own Raptor Lake-powered PCs. The studio founder says servers running on these Intel processors have experienced “constant crashes.”

Intel has attempted to address these issues with new microcode distributed via motherboard BIOS updates and has also asked motherboard manufacturers not to enable extreme power modes by default.

For example, in some cases MSI motherboards set a power limit of 4,096 watts and 512 amps; no Intel processor would ever use all that power, but this places more or less no restrictions on a chip’s automatic frequency boost technology, and it seems to cause failures.

That said, stability issues persist and Intel has not been entirely transparent about the root cause.

“Intel and its partners continue to investigate user reports of instability issues on 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core desktop processors (K/KF/KS),” it said. The register.

“We appreciate the Intel community’s patience on this issue and will share more details about the investigation as soon as possible. In the meantime, we continue to recommend that customers experiencing these issues contact Intel Customer Support for next steps regarding their 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core Desktop Processors (K/KF/KS).”

We’re switching to AMD, not buying Raptor Lake, says Alderon Games

But Cassells believes there’s a bigger underlying problem here than just instability issues addressed by motherboard configurations.

“Over the last 3-4 months, we’ve observed that processors that were initially working well are deteriorating over time and eventually failing,” he says. “The failure rate we’ve observed in our own testing is close to 100%, which indicates that it’s only a matter of time before affected processors fail.”

By the way, this vulture accidentally gave his old Intel Core i9-13900K processor to an acquaintance a few weeks ago, and it no longer works. This 13900K was installed in a gaming PC with a low-end motherboard that, by design, cannot maximize the chip’s power consumption. Previously, it passed SSD and GPU tests without problems.

Alderon Games has apparently lost patience with Raptor Lake processors and claims it is replacing all of its servers with AMD processors because they appear to “experience 100x fewer crashes than Intel processors that have been found to be faulty.”

Cassells also recommends that gamers, whether they’re hosting their own servers or just playing a game, avoid Raptor Lake processors. The developer even implemented an in-game notification to inform its users that Intel’s 13th and 14th generation chips are no good.

The register has contacted Alderon Games for further comment. ®

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