Frustration is mounting over Intel's inability to resolve its Raptor Lake instability problems. Game development studio Alderon Games revealed on its website that the company has had nonstop problems with Intel's 13th and 14th-generation processors in its servers, development systems, and customers' gaming PCs. The issues have become so prevalent that Alderon Games publicly stated that Intel sells defective 13th and 14th-generation CPUs.
Alderon Games revealed that it had observed a nearly 100% failure rate of Raptor Lake processors in its own testing. Telemetry from end customers reports thousands of Raptor Lake CPUs crashing in customers' gaming PCs. Alderon Game's own development systems utilizing Raptor Lake CPUs also suffer from frequent instability, leading to SSD and memory corruption. On top of this, the studio's dedicated game servers leveraging Raptor Lake parts experience "constant crashes" to the point where they are taking entire servers down.
The studio's benchmarking tools also show failures with Raptor Lake parts, specifically decompression and memory tests unrelated to its Path of Titans game, which the company is developing.
The worst part is that Alderon Gamers has observed CPU deterioration over time, specifically over three to four months. Initially, the chips will work fine but eventually start failing. Microcode, BIOS, and firmware updates have failed to resolve these stability problems for the game studio.
To compensate for these stability issues, Alderon Games is switching all of its game servers to AMD-based systems, which it says "experience 100 times fewer crashes compared to Intel CPUs that were found to be defective." It is also adding in-game notifications to its survival game Path of Titans that alert gamers running Raptor Lake CPUs in their gaming PCs.
Our previous report, sourced from Level1Tech, found a 50% failure rate among Raptor Lake Core i9-powered servers. But Alderon Games reports a near 100% failure rate among its Raptor Lake-powered machines.
It is understandable that Alderon Games has concluded that Intel's 13th and 14th Gen chips are downright defective. That may be the case, but Intel has still not determined the causation of these stability problems. Regardless, Raptor Lake instability is now occurring at an alarming rate, and Intel's latest microcode updates boast stricter power limit targets, but bug fixes are not fixing the issue.
