Recently released title Outpost: Infinity Siege just got its second patch in a matter of days rectifying certain crashes during cutscenes. However, the developerss revealed in the patch notes that there are still high-priority issues causing severe crashes and screen blackouts in-game. The issues are bad enough that the developers at Team Ranger are recommending users downclock their Core i9 Raptor Lake or Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs to 5 GHz as a temporary measure.
The recommended mitigations don't stop there. On top of the clock speed workaround, the developers recommend gamers switch power settings to energy-saving mode on appropriate hardware. The Outpost: Infinity Siege team also recommends verifying file integrity in Steam and updating graphics drivers, but these are not unusual recommendations for rectifying game instability.
If you check out the game's Steam page and Steam sub-forum, it won't take you long to discover that there are a lot of issues with the game. The game's comment section and forum are loaded with complaints about Outpost performance and instability. One example as reported by Game Pressure comes in the form of Out of Video memory Error crashes which the outlet says happens frequently in-game.
These issues appear to be even worse than other games that have received poor reception at launch, including Jedi: Survivor. That game had an absolutely abysmal performance at launch and was also subject to frequent instability.
Could Power Limits be another culprit?
Even though there is a lot of evidence pointing towards the game being the problem. The developer's recommendation to reduce clock speeds on certain Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs might be a problem with Intel's hardware specifically — rather than the game itself. A month ago, we reported on a serious issue related to Intel Raptor Lake CPUs (and by extension 14th Gen CPUs) where the default power limits on most Raptor Lake-supported boards were causing instability in certain games.
We found this problem is very legitimate and was also affecting our GPU review Jarred Walton in several games including Alan Wake 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Horizon Zero Dawn, Immortals of Aveum, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, and The Last of Us, Part 1.
The problem boils down to how the power limits in BIOS are set automatically for most Raptor Lake-supported boards. Nearly all compatible motherboards automatically ramp up the power limit to 4096W (i.e infinity) to prevent any sort of performance loss from power throttling. This improves performance, but technically this is not actually within official officiations of the chip. This can, unfortunately, lead to application instability in some cases, depending on silicon quality.
It is possible, but not guaranteed, that this is another culprit causing instability in Outpost: Infinity Siege. The fact that the developers targeted the i9-13900K and i9-14900K specifically backs up this theory even more since those two CPUs consume the most amount of power (and generate the most amount of heat) compared to their i7 and i5 contemporaries and are more susceptible to the issue.
