Matthew Cassell, founder of Alderon Games, has leveled sharp criticism at Intel’s 13th and 14th Gen CPUs, labeling them as “defective.” Cassell stated that Intel is marketing flawed processors, which have caused significant stability issues for his team working on the multiplayer dinosaur survival game, Path of Titans. According to Cassell, despite the release of numerous microcode, BIOS, and firmware updates, the problems persist.
Cassell detailed the issues encountered with the 13th and 14th generation Intel CPUs, which include frequent crashes, overall system instability, and memory corruption. These problems have severely affected the development and operation of their game. He outlined five key areas where failures have been identified:
1. **Crash Reports**: Thousands of crashes have been logged on Intel’s 13th and 14th Gen CPUs through their crash reporting tools.
2. **Server Instability**: Constant crashes have been taking down entire servers. Developers working with these CPUs face regular instability, which also leads to SSD and memory corruption.
3. **Community Server Issues**: Hosting community servers has been problematic due to persistent crashes.
4. **Decompression and Memory Tests**: Independent decompression and memory tests unrelated to Path of Titans also fail, highlighting broader issues with the CPUs.
5. **Deterioration Over Time**: CPUs that initially performed well deteriorated over three to four months, with nearly a 100% failure rate observed in Alderon Games’ testing.
Cassell noted that this issue has garnered attention from various news outlets and has also been acknowledged by Fortnite and RAD Game Tools, which provides decompression technology for the Unreal Engine. Users have reported misleading error messages about running out of video driver memory, despite having sufficient memory.
In response to these problems, Alderon Games has decided to switch all its servers to AMD processors, which Cassell claims experience 100 times fewer crashes compared to the defective Intel CPUs. This move is intended to prevent further damage to their game.
Earlier this year, there were reports of issues with Intel’s 13th Generation Raptor Lake and 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh chips. In response, Intel blamed the problems on motherboard manufacturers, stating that these manufacturers were operating the CPUs outside of Intel’s recommended settings. Intel warned that such modifications could lead to instability.
This controversy over Intel’s processors has raised significant concerns within the gaming and tech communities. The persistent stability issues and Intel’s response have highlighted the importance of reliable hardware and the need for stringent quality control to ensure that developers and end-users do not face such disruptive problems.
