13th and 14th-gen Intel processors' instability continues to plague gamers and developers

High-end 13th and 14th-gen Intel desktop CPUs have been experiencing stability issues for a while now. Intel and motherboard makers attempted to resolve it via BIOS updates that essentially lowered the power limits on the juice-hungry parts. However, it hasn't worked for everyone and now even game developers are feeling the heat.

Alderon Games, makers of Path of Titans (a dinosaur-themed MMO title), have put out rather inflammatory blog post talking about numerous problems they've encountered with Intel hardware. Internal logs reveal thousands of crashes among end users. Even the game's dedicated/community servers are volatile.

Even the dev team is not immune and have been at the receiving end of memory/SSD corruption due to said crashes. As a result, Alderon Games is now transitioning all server/development hardware to AMD and encouraging players to do the same.,

Next up, a Digital Extremes employee dug into crash logs of Warframe, a free-to-play action RPG, and found more than half of them originated from the Core i9-13900K, 13900KF, 14900K and 14900KF. Thankfully, a staff member who was afflicted by the issue was able to get a resolution via a BIOS update.

Epic Games Tools, a subsidiary of Epic Games that makes developer-centric software, also noted Oodle's (a data decompression tool) refusal to work the Core i9-14900K and 13900K. Like the others, they recommend a BIOS update and restricting power limits using Intel's XTU (Extreme Tuning Utility) tool. Epic Games even has a dedicated landing page for Fortnite players using the aforesaid hardware, which, once again, parrots the same advice.

To make matters worse, 2019's Plundervolt vulnerability resulted in limited undervolting capabilities for Intel CPUs. While undervolting comes with a performance hit, it is still better than not being able to play the game altogether.