Intel’s best processors have been the victim of a huge instability fiasco for a long time now. Still, the latest BIOS update was meant to resolve things for those who still have functional 13th- and 14th-gen CPUs.
Unfortunately, it appears that Intel is still yet to leave all the problems in the rearview mirror. According to the developers of the popular new title Black Myth: Wukong, gamers with Intel-based CPUs might struggle with crashes.
Is the new patch still not enough? It’s hard to say. The developer of the recent blockbuster action RPG took to Steam forums to talk about problems during shader compilation when running the game on Intel’s Raptor Lake processors. As per the post, the game might crash during that stage, or an “Out of memory” error might pop up. It’s certainly a demanding game, but this kind of crashing shouldn’t be happening very frequently.
However, reading the responses to the post reveals that the issue might not be limited to the Core i9-13900K and the Core i9-14900K, as is often the case with these Intel crashes. Another poster reports that their game crashes to desktop after shader compilation, and they’re running an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Several more unhappy AMD CPU owners spoke up, but their games seem to crash during a cutscene and not during shader compilation. Another user says they did encounter issues, but with a Core i9-14600K CPU.
If you’re running into problems, your best bet is to try to update your BIOS to the latest version — provided that your motherboard vendor already prepared the latest update that is said to fix Intel’s microcode issue. If there’s no such patch for you yet, the Game Science representative on the Steam message boards has two solutions for you: undervolt your CPU and skip shader compilation entirely. Unfortunately, for the second option, the game dev didn’t provide any instructions as to how to do that. They also can’t promise that the game won’t crash regardless.
This isn’t a good look, but it’s too early to judge whether Intel’s latest patch (once again) failed to fix the issue. For one, the patch was never meant to address existing problems; the CPUs that have been crashing need to be returned through Intel’s extended warranty. Instead, it’s meant to prevent the crashes from happening in the first place. Clearly, that may not be working in Black Myth: Wukong, but the mentions of AMD CPUs throw a wrench into the theory that only Intel is to blame here.
This is not the first time we’re hearing about the state of Intel CPUs directly from game devs. A game developer claimed that they might lose over $100K in lost players due to how often Intel CPUs have been crashing during gameplay. Meanwhile, Alderon Games, the studio behind Path of Titans, referred to Intel CPUs as defective and swapped all of their servers to AMD.