Game developer says Intel should recall its defective, crash-prone CPUs

Facepalm: Crashes experienced by customers owning recent high-end Intel processors aren’t just software or BIOS-related issues. Alderon Games founder Matthew Cassells says Chipzilla has made his company’s life much more complicated than it should be. The game developer has experienced considerable Intel CPU problems, including crashes, instability, and memory corruption.

The number of people and organizations forced to experience crashes and general instability on Intel’s latest CPU models keeps growing. Now, a game developer is blatantly pointing the finger at the Santa Clara corporation and its alleged “defective” products.

“Despite all released microcode, BIOS, and firmware updates, the problem remains unresolved,” Cassells said.

His team identified five main computing areas affected by instability and reliability issues: end customers, official dedicated game servers, development team, game server providers, and benchmarking tools.

Alderon’s current project, Path of Titans, is a multiplayer dinosaur survival game for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. The studio’s crash reporting tools show that users with Intel 13th/14th-gen CPU builds have experienced thousands of crashes. Even the official multiplayer servers are constantly crashing, requiring frequent (and expensive) reboots.

The development team has to deal with frequent instability on 13th and 14th-gen machines, which can cause SSD and memory corruption issues. Even multiplayer hosting servers managed by the community are crashing. Benchmarking tools show that decompression and memory tests unrelated to Path of Titans are failing as well. Intel CPUs initially worked quite well but deteriorated over time. Cassells claims his company’s failure rate is a shocking 100 percent of the entire PC fleet housing the newer Intel CPUs.

Alderon Games implemented measures to prevent further harm to Path of Titans development, including a mass migration of all servers to AMD processors. Cassells claims that the computers moved to AMD experienced 100 times fewer crashes than the Intel machines.

The studio is also recommending Path of Titan community server hosts do the same or at least avoid playing on the “defective” processors. To spread the word, the development team is adding a pop-up message in Path of Titans informing players on affected builds about the issue so they will know why their game continually crashes.

“For Intel’s sake, we hope they recall these CPUs and refund consumers,” Cassells stated. “This post isn’t an endorsement of AMD CPUs or any other PC company. Keep in mind any product can have defects and issues, we just want to let you know where these crashes are coming from and what is going on.”

Intel is still investigating the instability issues of its processors. However, it could have to carry out a consumer recall operation like it did in 1994 over the infamous Pentium FDIV bug.