Users of Intel's 13th and 14th generation high-end CPUs have been complaining about instability issues in games for several months now. Now, they also have to address negative feedback from GeForce GPU users. NVIDIA's latest GeForce GPU graphics driver contains some interesting release notes, which the company has also shared on its official forums.
The GeForce Game Ready Driver version 552.12 concludes with a "Note" section addressing two specific issues related to Chromium-based applications (such as web browsers and Discord) and troubles encountered by gamers using Intel's Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs.
For users experiencing stability issues, memory exhaustion errors, or shader compilation crashes on systems built around Intel's 13th/14th generation unlocked desktop CPUs, the release notes advise seeking troubleshooting assistance from Intel and Epic Games websites. NVIDIA's first referenced site links to the Intel Processor Support Forum, where an employee acknowledges the company's awareness of instability issues with "certain workloads."
In a statement released in February, Intel noted active collaboration with its partners to analyze these issues and provide effective solutions, despite ongoing reports of crashes by users. The second link provided by NVIDIA directs users to the RAD Game Tools website, where Epic Games elaborates on the nature of the issues.
According to RAD, the underlying cause of instability primarily seen on Intel 13900K and 14900K processors is a hardware issue, potentially resulting in "Oodle data decompression failure" or crashes in games built using the Unreal Engine. A small subset of these CPUs may exhibit this unpredictable behavior under heavy computational loads, likely triggered by a combination of BIOS settings, high CPU clock frequencies, and power usage.
RAD's website offers helpful solutions, including using software tools like Intel XTU to limit the peak performance of Intel CPUs and adjusting BIOS/UEFI firmware settings to mitigate instability or crashes. It's hoped that Intel will release a final fix for its high-performance gaming processors in the near future, likely through a microcode update.
In addition to the instability issues, the latest NVIDIA GeForce drivers also bring specific optimizations for ray tracing upgrades in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's third season, Call of Duty: Battlefield, and Diablo 4. This driver release also addresses an error with adjustable BAR configurations in Horizon: Beyond the West. However, unfortunately, some issues affecting older GPU hardware (GeForce GTX 10/RTX 20 series), Horizon: Beyond the West, Tekken 8, and VR games still await future fixes.
