Alderon Games calls Intel 13/14th Gen CPUs “Defective” and takes action
Path of Titans dev takes action to mitigate Intel Raptor Lake stability issues – Claims Intel are selling “Defective” CPUs
Alderon Games, the studio behind Path of Titans, the Dinosaur MMO Survival Game, have claimed that “Intel is selling defective 13-14th Gen CPUs”. In doing so, the developer had added fuel to the fire of Intel’s ongoing Raptor Lake stability saga. Now, the studio is taking action to mitigate the damage caused by these “defective” CPUs.
The company claims that Intel’s 13th/14th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs have suffered from major stability issues. This includes gamers suffering from “thousands of crashes”, developers facing stability issues, and gamers suffering from server crashes. Alderon Games have also claimed that “initially working” CPUs would “deteriorate over time” and eventually fail. The company has reported a failure rate of “nearly 100%” during their internal tests. As such, the studio believes that it is only a matter time before all affected CPUs fail.
Why Alderon Games claims Intel are “selling defective 13-14th Gen CPUs”
Alderon’s data reveals issues for gamers, developers, and server providers that use Intel’s 13th/14th generation Raptor Lake CPUs. Gamers experience game crashes. Developers suffers from stability issues. Server providers suffer from frequent server crashes, ruining the experience of Path of Titans players. The studio have also reported crashes in decompression and memory benchmarks.
We [Alderon Games] have identified failures in five main areas:
End Customers: Thousands of crashes on Intel CPUs on 13th and 14th Gen CPUs in our crash reporting tools.
Official Dedicated Game Servers: Experiencing constant crashes, taking entire servers down.
Development Team: Developers using these CPUs face frequent instability while building and working on the game. It can also cause SSD and memory corruption.
Game Server Providers: Hosting community servers with persistent crashing issues.
Benchmarking Tools: Decompression and memory tests unrelated to Path of Titans also fail.
What Actions are Alderon Games Taking?
Alderon Games are currently in the process of implementing the following measures to minimise the impact of Intel’s so-called “defective” CPUs. For starters, all game servers will be moving to AMD CPUs. The studio claims that servers using AMD CPUs crash 100x less frequently than servers with affected Intel CPUs. Additionally, the developer is recommending that anyone hosting Path of Titans servers or selling game servers avoid Intel 13th/14th generation CPUs.
Furthermore, an in-game notification will be shown to users of affected CPUs about this potential issue. This will inform users about why their game may be crashing and what they can do about it. In other words, Alderon Games don’t want to be blamed for Intel’s CPU stability issues.
To prevent further harm to our game, we are implementing the following measures:
Server Migration: We are swapping all our servers to AMD, which experience 100 times fewer crashes compared to Intel CPUs that were found to be defective.
Hosting Recommendations: We advise anyone hosting Path of Titans servers or selling game servers to avoid purchasing or using 13th and 14th gen Intel CPUs.
In-Game Notifications: We are adding a popup message in-game to inform users with these processors about the issue. Many users are currently unaware of why their game is crashing and what they can do about it.
Alderon Games have made a brave move by directly confronting Intel about this issue. One does not challenge a giant like Intel lightly. Props to Alderon Games for helping to bring this issue to light. Hopefully, Intel will take appropriate actions here, as further silence on this issue will only cause further damage to Intel’s reputation.
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