Unreal Engine Supervisor Discloses 50% Failure Rate With Intel’s Core i9-14900K & 13900K CPUs, Switches To AMD For “Reliability”

Unreal Engine's supervisor has disclosed that it has faced a 50% failure rate with Intel's Core i9-14900K & Core i9-13900K CPUs.

Intel's CPU instability fiasco has taken a drastic turn in recent days since the problem has enlarged to the extent that it has started to bother the "professional" side of the community, forcing them to spread awareness on the issue.

Game studios such as Alderon Games, Warframe, and even Epic Games have communicated the problem to their users through blog posts, urging them to either implement Intel's directed fix or switch to alternatives likely from AMD. Now, Unreal Engine's supervisor at ModelFarm, Dylan Browne, has revealed how big of an impact Intel's instability issue is having on the company's workflow.

In a post on X, Dylan revealed that they had witnessed a 50% failure rate with Intel's Core i9-14900K & Core i9-13900K desktop CPUs.

This means one out of every two processors is exposed to instability issues, which shows the severity of the matter. Given that companies like ModelFarm are facing instability problems, one can only imagine the extent of the problem at large-scale firms and how they are being troubled by the issue. Dylan further clarified that the firm's new machines will switch to AMD's new Ryzen 9000 series desktop CPUs, claiming that "production environments need reliability."

Dylan claimed that his team implemented all the fixes advised by Intel, including implementing lower power limits and adjusting the motherboard settings, but despite multiple attempts, Intel's CPUs were still a victim of the problem. Interestingly, the 50% failure rate is measured over one year, which isn't much usage at all, and simply seeing Intel's CPUs lacking is indeed disappointing.

It is stated that they are using ASUS ROG motherboards but haven't upgraded the BIOS to the latest ones yet. Some of the models are said to have exhibited instability issues right away while others took a bit to start showing symptoms.

At Intel's camp, well, the company claims that elevated operating voltages were the primary contributor to the issues and the presence of problematic microcode algorithms resulted in incorrect voltage requests to the CPU, yet again creating a new twist in the plot. Our recent coverage went in-depth into how Intel "switched" its statements on the explanation of the problem and the "u-turns" taken by the company. The company is expected to ship out a new microcode to fix some of these issues but it is unclear whether these will fully address the instability or we will have to wait for more microcode/BIOS patches in the future.