Game Crashes During Gameplay Intel 14900k

[TKLive]

For anyone out there running a 14900k, after Windows update, Nvidia update, and Game update. I started getting random crashes while playing. I've used Intel Extreme Tuning Utility and put the Performance Core Ratio from 57x to 55x and haven't had a crash for a good 2 hours.

[Illusion of Progress]

That means your CPU has degraded and is no longer stable at its stock performance profile.. There is a known issue with some Raptor Lake CPUs (Intel 13th/14th generation) physically degrading over time. It happens faster on the models that boost higher. Any Raptor Lake CPU model with a TDP of 65W or higher is susceptible though.

When it degrades enough, you'll begin to see crashing. Unreal Engine 5 or DirectX 12 games with shader compilation (very CPU heavy) are a seemingly common workload that exposes it. If you see fatal error crashes with "could not decompress shader" and/or "out of memory trying to allocate a rendering resource", that's a telltale way those CPUs exhibit they have degraded.

Common potential measures to regain stability are switching to DirectX 11 mode (less CPU demanding as there's no shader compilation) or reducing the clock speed as you've done. But if you're already having the crashes, the damage has already started and it will never get better, and it may get worse later.

People experiencing this issue with those CPUs need to be doing RMAs. It means the CPU is already physically and irreversibly damaged. Intel specifically offered an extended 5 year warranty for CPUs affected by this.

Also, it it's not already, update your BIOS to the latest one because newer BIOS have limits which are supposed to address this from occurring (but I've heard mixed things on if it does that well enough).

[TKLive]

Originally posted by Illusion of Progress:

That means your CPU has degraded and is no longer stable at its stock performance profile.. There is a known issue with some Raptor Lake CPUs (Intel 13th/14th generation) physically degrading over time. It happens faster on the models that boost higher. Any Raptor Lake CPU model with a TDP of 65W or higher is susceptible though.

When it degrades enough, you'll begin to see crashing. Unreal Engine 5 or DirectX 12 games with shader compilation (very CPU heavy) are a seemingly common workload that exposes it. If you see fatal error crashes with "could not decompress shader" and/or "out of memory trying to allocate a rendering resource", that's a telltale way those CPUs exhibit they have degraded.

Common potential measures to regain stability are switching to DirectX 11 mode (less CPU demanding as there's no shader compilation) or reducing the clock speed as you've done. But if you're already having the crashes, the damage has already started and it will never get better, and it may get worse later.

People experiencing this issue with those CPUs need to be doing RMAs. It means the CPU is already physically and irreversibly damaged. Intel specifically offered an extended 5 year warranty for CPUs affected by this.

Also, it it's not already, update your BIOS to the latest one because newer BIOS have limits which are supposed to address this from occurring (but I've heard mixed things on if it does that well enough).

Haven't been having all those issues, mostly just games randomly crashing. I'm going to keep putting 57x to 55x for now, if I run into more issues i'll surely make sure to RMA the chip since they have extended their warranty.

Thank you

[Illusion of Progress]

Originally posted by TKLive:

Haven't been having all those issues, mostly just games randomly crashing.

Well that's precisely the issue. The stuff is crashing because the CPU degraded until it was no longer stable at the highest points of its performance curve. By limiting the boost, you're basically underclocking it to prevent it from reaching the part of its performance curve where it has become unstable.

It might be a hassle, but if you have one of those CPUs and you know it's degraded, it's better to just get it over with. You won't have to worry about it cropping up again later, and you won't be able to be sure if future crashes are due to unstable hardware or it's simply a software issue. Once it's degraded to that point, it's no longer properly functional, and the damage can't be reversed. But Intel will replace it.

If you got the PC through an OEM/SI or as a laptop, might have to go through them, which may complicate it. Many of them may not acknowledge the issue and tell you if the standard warranty is up, there's nothing that can do.