Increasing numbers of users of the Core i9-13900K and Core i7-13700K have reported crashes in some of the latest games, usually accompanied by an out of video memory error. It's not just random end-users either: Our GPU reviewer has personally dealt with this, as has Hassan Mujtaba from WCCFTech. There's a new Steam forum thread on the subject as well. Considering Intel's processors are some of the best CPUs for gaming, it's a particularly painful problem when things go amiss.
Update: We've reached out to Intel for comment, and the official response was: "Intel is aware of reports regarding Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen unlocked desktop processors experiencing issues with certain workloads. We’re engaged with our partners and are conducting analysis of the reported issues." Hopefully, things get sorted sooner than later. Also, games that use Oodle are routinely impacted by affected processors, and Oodle released a statement with additional details on the problem.
Our GPU reviewer dealt with the matter and finally tracked down the root cause to his motherboard's default power and current limit settings. Both were set to effectively "unlimited" — 4096W and 4096A — after loading the default optimized BIOS settings. That was with a Core i9-13900K, and while most reports concern the 13900K and 13700K thus far, the Core i9-14900K and Core i7-14700K may also be affected given they're basically the same silicon.
Complaints about stability issues on the 13900K and 13700K aren't exactly widespread, but have become particularly concentrated on a handful of games, specifically for those with shader compilation. It's not even just a rumor going around on forums as at least two developers and Nvidia itself have explicitly identified that the "out of video memory error," which you would normally think is a GPU issue, is actually related to 13th Gen CPUs.
Gearbox and Fatshark, which develop Remnant 2 and Vermintide 2 respectively, have both noted these very issues and have narrowed them down to the 13900K, and also the 13700K according to Fatshark. Gearbox even says, "If you experience this problem, you will likely also see it in other DX12 games," which is to say that it's not an issue specific to Remnant 2. The issue isn't even that new, as Gearbox's warnings were made back in August.
Our own Jarred Walton has seen the problem in quite a few games: Alan Wake 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Horizon Zero Dawn, Immortals of Aveum, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, and The Last of Us, Part 1 to name specific examples. Hogwarts, Horizon, and The Last of Us are all particularly painful examples in his case, and at 'stock' settings would crash during the shader compilation process probably over 90% of the time. So what's going on?
For its part, Nvidia told a user that, "Despite the game saying the issue is with your VRAM... Unreal Engine 5 games seem to have some issues with this particular model (and possibly other 13th-generation Intel CPUs)."
Nvidia and the two developers have all recommended that users who experience these crashes on the 13900K and other CPUs downclock their chips by up to 200MHz. The obvious downside of this is that it reduces performance, which isn't exactly ideal. But we and others have found some other solutions that seem to work just as well.
