Owners of Intel’s latest 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 desktop processors have been noticing an increase in game crashes in recent months. This was so prevalent that Epic Games issued a support notice to encourage Intel Core i9 13900K and 14900K owners to adjust BIOS settings. 

Intel says it’s investigating the reports. “Intel is aware of problems that occur when executing certain tasks on 13th and 14th generation core processors for desktop PCs, and is analyzing them with major affiliates,” says an Intel spokesperson in a statement to ZDNet Korea. Intel’s investigation comes just days after PCWorld had to swap out a Core i9 13900K processor to stop Fortnite from crashing on a writer’s PC.

The crashes vary in severity depending on the game, with some titles producing an “out of memory” error, others simply exiting out to the desktop, and some locking up a machine entirely.

Reported effected games:  

• The Finals 
• Fortnite 
• Tekken 8 

FIXES

Game crashes can happen on a 14900K system and reducing the performance core ratio limit are reported to improve things on a system.

The only fixes that seem to improve stability involve manually downclocking or undervolting Intel’s processors. Epic Games has suggested altering the SVID behavior to Intel Fail Safe in the BIOS settings of Asus, Gigabyte, or MSI motherboards. Custom PC builders Power GPU recommend reducing the performance core ratio limit, which seems to improve stability in certain games. 

Most of the games affected seem to be based on the Unreal Engine, which could point to a stability issue that Intel needs to address.